Welcome back to another Farm Friday with Hawkins! This week he’s talking about cherry bloom, cherry set, and “June drop”.
Video Transcript:
“Hawkins Gebbers here again on Farm Friday! This many cherries blossomed. This many set, okay. Bees got to them, they got pollinated, cross-pollinated. When this many set not all of them are gonna make it to harvest. Look at this, come in here. Right there there’s two matchsticks that set, oh they fell off! So at one point that looked like every other cherry. When petals fell we ended up with a lot of matchsticks. These didn’t develop so that’s already dropped so now we have all healthy cherries that have made it to this point. Now we’re looking for the June drop. So the June drop is when a cherry tree decides through the stress and development of the early spring what is actually viable that it wants to raise to harvest. Here’s a good example, come in over here from my view. That cherry, May drop. Okay, you want to see what’s going to be a June drop? Anything with red or yellow on it already hard and a little bit smaller is going to drop. You’re going to drop, you’re going to drop, gonna drop. So if you show up to your cherry block and you’re super stoked about how many cherries are in it and it’s already red at this stage it’s like well it was gonna be an awesome season and now it’s gonna be an okay season. Other times you have like an overloaded crop in May and you’re like oh no the quality is going to be poor and then you see your June drop and it drops like 40% of the cherries now you have the quality you want. That’s what we want as farmers – to come to the marketplace with big hard calcium filled high bricks cherries.”
