'Big fruit year' say cherry growers

Flathead cherry season is here, and lots of sweet, juicy cherries are ripe and ready to eat.

“Big fruit this year,” said Bruce Johnson, a board member of the Flathead Cherry Grower’s Co-op. “Lots of size, and lots of stands are open. There should be plenty of cherries available.”

Johnson was picking Lapins in his orchard last Thursday and said the harvest was “essentially 10 days early.” He added that Washington cherries were a little late, and all of their fruit came on at once, creating a glut in the market so cherry prices dropped.

Many orchardists are waIting to pick their cherries in hopes the prices will rise.

“When the cherries are ripe, you want to get them in the cooler,” Johnson said. “Hot weather makes the cherries softer.”

Cherries cool naturally at night from midnight to 6 a.m., he said.

“It was 58 degrees at 6 a.m. this morning (July 20). You want the cherries to cool down.”

Something most people don’t know is that all sweet cherries are hand-picked, individually, Johnson said, and the pickers start early, when the cherries are still cool. It’s a labor-intensive process – up and down ladders, carrying the fruit to the boxes to go to the plant. Plus sweet cherries are picked with the stem left on the delectable red fruit.

The Finley Point Co-op is open and was receiving fruit as of July 19, Johnson said, explaining that the cherry plant is a staging area. When the cherries are picked, they go in drainable plastic boxes that hold 120 pounds of cherries apiece.

The boxes go to the plant where they are sent on a conveyor belt through a spray bath of 34-degree water and hydro-cooled. The cooled cherries then go into a giant cooling area until there are enough cherries to fill a refrigerator truck, which delivers the fruit to Monson Fruit in Selah, Wash., for marketing and sale.

A rumor is circulating that there aren’t many cherry pickers here yet. Johnson agrees, but said that the vast majority of cherry pickers in the Flathead are from the Tri-Cities area in Washington state.

If the Flathead growers need cherry pickers, they can call. “It’s only a day’s drive here,” he said.

With many varieties of sweet cherries, some ripen before others. The Lapins Johnson grew have been picked, but the Sweethearts are probably two weeks out, he said.

Skeena, a Canadian variety, is a later cherry, too, and will be the next cherries Johnson picks.

With plenty of cherries, and some ripening later and extending the cherry season, there should be fruit aplenty. Be aware of cherry-jams on Hwy. 35 as folks pull off the road to load up their cars.

Nelsons continue the long line of family cherry stand

The Nelson cherry stand above Blue Bay is the color of a ripe Dixon melon. The venerable stand has always been some shade of orange; and it started life as the Pinkerman cherry stand, when Kari Nelson’s grandparents. Karl and Violet Pinkerman, ran the stand.

“My grandfather drove the schoolbus,” Kari said, and she believes he may have had extra orange paint from touching up buses, and decided to paint the stand orange because it was a nice bright color.

The Pinkermans bought the cherry orchard in 1939 and moved here from Anaconda in 1941.

“Andaconda,” Kari’s husband Mike quipped, because that’s how Kari’s grandfather pronounced his hometown.

Kari’s dad was a school teacher in Hardin so the family lived there during the fall and winter and summered on Flathead Lake. Then, Aunt Viola Lewis, who married Kari’s mother’s brother, and her husband, Escoe, were in charge of the cherry orchard and stand.

“And now we’ve got it,” Kari said, so it’s been in the family a long time.

Kari is womaning the stand with help from the couple’s Small Munsterlander, Speck, while Mike goes to town for supplies.

“We’re old school,” Kari said, explaining that the couple raises Lambert cherries, which the local cherry growers’ association does not accept. So they have to find their own market.

Before her time, Kari said there was a cherry packing plant in Polson and one in Kalispell, and when she was a child, she remembers when there were two packing plants on Finley Point.

This year the cherries are plentiful and tasty, and Kari has plans to frame some old-time pictures to decorate the orange cherry stand, and keep it all in the family for generations to come.