Cherry Picking News 2011
From Villa del Sol Farms:

Villa del Sol is Leona Valley, southern California’s largest U-pick cherry farm!
www.upickcherries.com

Dear Friends,

This has been a stressful week here at the cherry orchard, but we finally have good news.  The bloom this year was fantastic.  We were just beginning to get a great fruit set (some of the cherries were already the size of large peas) when, about a week ago, we had a very bad freeze.  The first night of the freeze, Gary was never able to go to bed.  He fought the freeze all night running fans and water while monitoring the temperature.  The low was 27 degrees.  Then the next night it stayed above freezing until about 3am when Gary again went to the orchard to fight the freeze.  That night wound up getting even colder than the first at 26 degrees.  Even with all of Gary’s efforts, the freeze killed a lot of cherries.   The good news is that the fruit in the western third of the orchard survived remarkably well as well as the fruit in the center of the orchard.  Those cherries are growing day by day.  We expect to have ripe cherries by the first weekend of June.  As the cherries ripen, I’ll keep you posted as to days and times we will be open for picking.  I guess we should look at the positive side:  the freeze was a natural thinning process.  That means that the cherries we have will be larger and sweeter than ever!  It won’t be like last year where we couldn’t sell all the cherries before the weather got too hot.  (Last year we wound up donating about 8000 pounds of cherries to charities rather than let them go to waste!)  It will rather be a fair year.  That is why we will not be opening on Memorial Weekend even though it looks to be a warm spring.  We’ll hold of an extra week to let the cherries ripen even more!

We should now be at the end of the bad weather.  Gary has begun weeding and mowing and has turned on the “bird screechers” (to try to keep the birds from eating the cherries).  We’ll keep you posted as picking time gets closer.  In the next few days I’m going to put some pictures on the web site of this winter’s snow in the orchard, the beautiful bloom we had as well as the ripening cherries.  I have had people inquire about coming to the orchard to see the bloom.  We’d love to allow that but that is the time we bring in millions of honey bees to pollinate the trees.  It would be too dangerous for us to allow people in.

Now that the worst is over, we are getting excited.  We look forward to again seeing you at the orchard.

Maxi and Gary

Villa del Sol Sweet Cherry Farms