A Quick Guide to Cherry Size (And Why Smaller Numbers Mean Bigger Fruit)

It’s Sunday morning, and I’m sitting on the hard cement steps that serve as bleachers for my nine-year-old son’s baseball game. As I pull my coat over my sweatshirt to protect myself from the windy, gray San Francisco weather, a dad on our baseball team turns and holds out a Tupperware container. “Want a cherry?” he asks.

He’s offering lovely, huge, dark-red cherries. “We picked them yesterday,” he shares, “I think we got like 60 pounds. We go out to Brentwood every year and have been going since I was a kid.” I take a cherry, thank him for sharing his haul, and admire the cherry’s size. It’s massive—at least an 8-row fruit!

How to Measure Cherry Size: A Quick Guide

Fruit nerd moment: When we talk about cherry sizes, we use rows as the metric. The term comes from the number of cherries that fit in a row across a standard box, which historically was about 10.5 inches wide. “10 1/2-row” cherries are roughly an inch in diameter. An 8-row fruit is about as big as a cherry gets. The smallest cherries we usually see are 12-row or 13-row. The smaller the number, the larger the cherry, because it takes fewer cherries to spread across the row. I’ve always thought that’s funny.

Of course, these days we don’t actually have to pack cherries into a box to learn how big they are. Farmers and fruit buyers (like our team at The FruitGuys) use handy sizing cards to figure out a cherry’s size, no box needed. The cards have holes cut into them for the common cherry sizes, so all you have to do is compare each hole to the size of the fruit.

Fruit Nerds, Unite!

As I enjoy my cherry and its health benefits, I overhear the dad sharing his fruit with another family. He tells them that this year, the pickings were slim due to late rains, and two years ago, it was much more bountiful. Then he shares that these are Coral cherries. Similar to the Bing cherry, the Coral is harvested earlier in the season. It has a little less acid and is very sweet. I can’t help smiling to myself over how excited he is to share this fruit (and his experience picking it) with our baseball families.

I love finding other fruit nerds. But more than that, I love noticing again and again how food connects people. I’d never really talked to this dad before, but that morning, we ended up swapping cherry-picking stories and debating what to do with so many cherries. (I think cherries are best eaten fresh or sweetened, preserved, and dangling in a Manhattan—but that’s just me.)

A Quick Update on Cherry Season

Cherry season is in full swing in Northern California, and many of our clients on the West Coast have already gotten fresh cherries in their fruit mix deliveries. The season will start a little later on the East Coast and in the Midwest. Sadly, some parts of the East Coast may have slim pickings due to that late-season frost I mentioned last week. You can learn more about these sweet little stone fruits in our writer Lex’s recent blog post about the difference between red and black cherries. And a warning if you do go cherry picking: Those buckets can fill up fast, so be prepared to share lots of cherries with friends.