bcla
On our rugged Eastern foothills.....
- Joined
- Nov 28, 2012
Anyone have a family tradition of doing this? I remember doing this a lot as a kid where we'd go out and maybe even the extended family would do it. We'd get on scary looking wooden ladders and sometimes were as high as 15 feet up.
So I haven't done it much since I started my own family, but recently my wife was talking to a friend who went and she wanted me to find out where. The one big place around here is Brentwood (not the LA one), California in eastern Contra Costa County. I remember when it was a sleepy agricultural town before subdeveopments were built to house families priced out of communities closer to San Francisco and Oakland.
It was two weekends ago and we still have some of the cherries. On May 5 I checked to see which places were open and it looked like maybe 2 that I could definitely find were open. One company had four locations with only one open. They also had their online waiver (we never needed one when I was a kid) and filled it out before arriving. It was a little bit early in the season and there weren't too many ripe cherries. It was also $3.50 a pound, which didn't see like that great a bargain. When I was a kid I remember maybe 35 cents a pound, which is much cheaper even accounting for inflation. We would bring coolers and literally be eating them for the next 3 months. They didn't really go bad that quickly as long as the stems were intact and they were refrigerated.
The newer trees seem to be trimmed so they don't grow too tall by design. And around here Brooks seems to be the dominant variety, when Bing used to be the big one when I was a kid. I guess a lot of these places replanted when their older trees were getting less productive. I'm thinking of going on Memorial Day weekend. It will be a zoo and I've seen it where farms closed before the end of Memorial Day because of a lack of ripe fruit since they'd been picked all weekend.
There was also a story in the news where one cherry orchard was vandalized and all the trees damaged. The owner was a former NFL player.
So anyone else try fruit picking?
So I haven't done it much since I started my own family, but recently my wife was talking to a friend who went and she wanted me to find out where. The one big place around here is Brentwood (not the LA one), California in eastern Contra Costa County. I remember when it was a sleepy agricultural town before subdeveopments were built to house families priced out of communities closer to San Francisco and Oakland.
It was two weekends ago and we still have some of the cherries. On May 5 I checked to see which places were open and it looked like maybe 2 that I could definitely find were open. One company had four locations with only one open. They also had their online waiver (we never needed one when I was a kid) and filled it out before arriving. It was a little bit early in the season and there weren't too many ripe cherries. It was also $3.50 a pound, which didn't see like that great a bargain. When I was a kid I remember maybe 35 cents a pound, which is much cheaper even accounting for inflation. We would bring coolers and literally be eating them for the next 3 months. They didn't really go bad that quickly as long as the stems were intact and they were refrigerated.
The newer trees seem to be trimmed so they don't grow too tall by design. And around here Brooks seems to be the dominant variety, when Bing used to be the big one when I was a kid. I guess a lot of these places replanted when their older trees were getting less productive. I'm thinking of going on Memorial Day weekend. It will be a zoo and I've seen it where farms closed before the end of Memorial Day because of a lack of ripe fruit since they'd been picked all weekend.
There was also a story in the news where one cherry orchard was vandalized and all the trees damaged. The owner was a former NFL player.
So anyone else try fruit picking?
