Big crop for Weiser-area fruit growers

The Vonde family drove out from Boise on Saturday to pick sweet cherries at Brooke Orchards near Weiser.
 It was a fun outing for Chris, Ann, daughter Helene, 4, and baby Gabriel. With tree branches weighed down with fruit, it didn’t take long to fill up a bucket or two of ripe cherries.
 “We have a lot of fruit this year,” Kathy Brooke said, while weighing buckets of cherries at a table set up in the orchard.
 Brooke Orchards, located halfway between Weiser and Payette, is open daily for U-pick cherries until they run out. And if you don’t feel like picking your own, there are fresh-picked cherries for sale at the shed located off Hill Road.
 Seasonal workers pick and sort cherries to sell to visitors who saw the signs along U.S. Highway 95 or heard about the cherry harvest on Facebook. The family run fruit business has a lot of repeat visitors every year, and they start calling in May to find out when the cherries will be ready.
 “This year is a real large crop. We still have a lot of cherries to sell,” Rich Brooke said on Monday.
 The varieties of cherries this year include Kiona, Sandra Rose, Bing, Rainier and Benton. There also are apricots for sale that have sized nicely this year, Rich Brooke said.
 The fresh-picked cherries are immediately given an ice bath that brings their temperature down and helps them last longer and stay firm. The best are sold by the pound at the sale shed during the short two or three weeks when the cherries are ready and ripe.
 It’s a good year for the two main Weiser-area fruit growers, Brooke Orchards and Kelley Orchards, which are enjoying back-to-back bountiful seasons.
 Just across Hill Road at Kelley Orchards, the tart pie cherries should be ready this week for picking. The two orchards grow different varieties of fruit so they are not in direct competition with each other and also to give consumers more choices.
 This year looks to be better than 2018, Ron Kelley said. A freeze on May 1 hurt some apricots but the other fruit did great. The freeze was late enough that it didn’t damage the peaches or nectarines or pie cherries that were out.
 “This spring was really good for us,” he said. “The crop looks good.”
 Kelley Orchards is known for its big, juicy peaches, along with nectarines, pluots, pie cherries, apples and more. The pie cherries will be ready to pick by July 3. The peaches and nectarines should be ready around Aug. 1. The apples come later and won’t be ready until late September.
 Ron and Kimi Kelley sell fresh and dried fruit at their stand at the orchard on Hill Road. Ron also travels to farmers markets around the Treasure Valley, lugging cases of fresh peaches and nectarines, and he always sells out.
 Fruit growers, perhaps more so than other row crop farmers, have everything riding on the weather, and it only takes one cold snap to do damage. There is no chance to replant if disaster strikes.
 In the big snow winter of 2017, a super hard freeze of minus 20 degrees in January ruined the entire crop of cherries, along with all of the apricots and plums. The freeze killed the buds early, a total loss, for both orchards.
 The weather can be fickle, if not unpredictable. The year before, in 2016, Brooke Orchards had huge harvests of cherries. The branches were literally sagging under the weight of bunches of cherries, and the next year there were none.
 The two orchards are just about the only commercial fruit growers left in Washington County, an area that once boasted of orchards that grew dozens of varieties of apples and other fruit for export all over the U.S.