Cherry picking!
Last year’s cherry crop was wiped out with a poorly timed hard frost, so this year all of the orchards’ trees are making up for it with a bumper crop. The trees are just dripping with fruit.
We stopped at two local farms to make our first picks of the year.
Our first stop was Cherry Hill, which is literally just around the corner from us. This business is owned by a Whitworth family (I taught both their daughter and one of their sons) and they only grow cherries. That means they are only open for 3ish weeks out of the year. They have this gigantic beautiful red barn that is only used for those few weeks. Crazy! We picked Rainier cherries here, Steve’s favorite.
Our second stop was a bit of a long shot called Roenings. This place is old school Green Bluff. It barely has a sign. It’s on our road so we drive by it every day, but it was never quite clear what they grow, and you can’t see anything but an old house and overgrown trees and wildflowers from the road. You wind up the barely marked driveway up to the top of the bluff when, sure enough - it opens up and there’s a huge old orchard up there! One farmer sitting by his stack of buckets and very old school scale in a really old dilapidated barn. But here’s the catch - Roenings is the only orchard on the Bluff who grows Cavalier cherries. We have never heard of this variety, but OMG. They are the first to ripen and they stay the longest on the limbs. But it is their color - super dark, outside and in - and their taste - out of this world, over twice as sweet as Rainiers, and they make a mockery of Bings. We were just in awe of this little gem of an old orchard. There was only one other car there while we were there (vs Cherry Hill had 3+ dozen at any time.) The sweetness and beauty of those Cavaliers just blew us away.
You can see below how dark the flesh is of these Cavaliers- so sweet!
So what will we do with our haul? We will eat a ton fresh this week, that’s first. We will pit and freeze the rest for some tbd future treats! And we might need to check out a few more local places next week while the season is in full gear.
