National Cherry Festival organizers were happy to hear the Northern Michigan cherry crop cooperated this year.
Typically the sweet cherry crops aren’t ready to be picked until the end of July, but this year farmers were able to get out and pick early.
“I think people are surprised that they’re local cherries. We’ve had to reiterate to people that they are right here from Michigan,” says Steve Rubinus.
Rubinus has been selling cherries for Edmondson Orchard all week at the National Cherry Festival.
He says it isn’t often that the sweet cherry crop is ready this early, but their crews have been out the last week picking cherries from trees.
“We are picking cherries as fast as we can. This rain is not good for them, they start splitting. So last week we lost a bunch and we’re hoping that the rain doesn’t keep going here to lose some more,” says Rubinus.
He says they’ve sold more than 3,000 cartons of cherries.
So much so, they’ve had to turn people away from their booth and point them to the orchard itself.
Rubinus says, “It’s super exciting. It’s nice too because there’s less activities to do here at the Cherry Fest so having something for the families to go and do our at the farm is super cool. The traffic we’ve had out there has just been sensational.”
The National Cherry Festival says every year they have to adjust based on the crops.
“These eight days it is not normal for us on a normal year to have local sweet cherries. On a year we wouldn’t have the local ones we usually do try to get some from at least Michigan,” says Executive Director of the festival, Kat Paye.
She says having local cherries keeps the business at home.
“It’s all about celebrating our growers, the fruit, the industry and what we love most about Northern Michigan,” says Paye.
Edmondson’s says they expect to double their sales by the end of the week.
That will bring them in at selling over 6,000 cartons of sweet cherries, but that say that all depends on the weather.
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