The Freshest Cherries Ever!

While we are camped here in eastern Washington, we seem to be living in the middle of wheat country. There are golden fields just waiting for harvest among the rolling hills. Where the hills aren't covered with pine trees, they are covered with wheat.

But there is one little pocket of fruit growers about 20 miles north of Spokane around the town of Green Bluff, Washington. They advertise this area with a map that gives the locations of twenty different fruit farms. As you enter the fruit loop, there are plenty of signs pointing you to places like Mrs. Kalin's Barn or Walter's Fruit Ranch.

We drove through this area after a long day of hiking and huckleberry picking, so it was after 5:00 p.m. That meant that most of the fruit stands had closed for the day. But we followed the signs to Robles Cherries and found an "open" sign among the free range chickens in the yard. Mr. Robles escorted us out to the cherry orchard and handed us buckets and ladders for our first cherry-picking adventure. He picked samples from each of the trees, letting us taste the different varieties so we could determine what we wanted to buy.

Mark is up in a bing cherry tree, where the picking is easy because the fruit is so big and plentiful. Most of the dark cherries we have seen in the grocery store all our lives are bings. But here in cherry country, we also see dark cherries with names like Van, Lambert, Sweetheart, and Lapin. To the untrained eye, these look like Bings, but they are actually Lapins.

Denisa was picking without a ladder, under this Rainier cherry tree. The very lowest branches are just sticks that have no leaves or cherries. That's because the deer have found this orchard and stripped it as far as they could reach. They also wiped out an acre of corn and other vegetables here. So those innocent-looking deer that we enjoy seeing on the trail are not appreciated here in fruit and vegetable country.

When Mr. Robles gave us our instructions for cherry picking, he pointed that you pick the entire stem, not just the cherry. That will keep the fruit fresher longer without that open hole on the top. He heard a small click, and was just going to warn us about something else when a sudden explosion rocked the orchard. He has an automatic cannon in the middle of the trees that scares the birds from landing in the trees and beaking the cherries. That same cannon is very good at startling the human pickers. We came to find out that when you hear the click, you brace yourself for an explosion. This picture gives an idea of just how loaded the branches are with cherries. It was a fun and easy task to pick this fruit that piled up heavy in our buckets in a hurry.

Before we left, we had almost six pounds of cherries in our buckets. At $2 per pound, they are a pretty good value compared to the prices we are seeing in the grocery stores. And we can verify that these are very fresh.

This stop has made a good dent in Denisa's plan to eat her weight in cherries before she leaves Washington. But with all the fruit (and desserts made out of the fruit) she's eating, the scale literally keeps tipping the wrong direction. We're leaving Washington soon, hoping to find more fruit down the road. For now, these beautiful gems will keep her busy for a day or two.