Feature Fruit: Cherries
Our Plump-Sweet Cherries are claret-colored, incredibly sweet and juicy, and have a delightfully crisp bite. We will also be shipping Rainier cherries, which are a creamy golden color and have a sweeter, more delicate flavor. Both are handpicked at peak ripeness in the Pacific Northwest and packaged with extra care to ensure they arrive in perfect condition.
NOW HAPPENING IN THE ORCHARDS
Orchard crews continue to irrigate the peach and pear orchards, hoping for good rainfall and no hailstorms. Crews are preparing for the beginning of harvest. Depending on average temperatures over the coming weeks, the peach harvest will begin as early as mid-July and as late as early August.
Harvest Information
While our Royal Riviera
® Pears are gone until fall, summer brings other tasty pear varieties to get excited about. We are shipping Angélys, Taylor’s Gold, and D’Anjou pears from the Pacific Northwest and New Zealand.
STONE FRUIT
We are shipping peaches grown in California and Oregon as well as nectarines and plums grown in central California.
This July we are shipping crisp and juicy Smitten and Pink Lady apples grown in New Zealand and Empire apples grown in New York.
Clementines grown in South America are shipping.
SPECIALTY VEGETABLES
Our featured vegetable this month is actually a stone fruit, California Hass avocados. We are also shipping green tomatoes and shiitake mushrooms grown in California and white asparagus grown in Peru.
Orchard Facts
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How do your orchardists ensure your pears are all ripe when they arrive, even when the
weather is different from year to year?
Because pears require cold weather to become sweet, our orchardists pick each pear the
moment it ripens, after which we place them in cold storage for up to 30 days. This ensures that every
pear in your box will arrive within a day or two of being ready to eat.
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How do you get great pears all year round?
We work with growers in multiple parts of the world to ensure that we have access to the
right climate to grow top-quality Comice pears all year. Our orchardists fly out to Chile and New
Zealand to inspect the pears we select, and we fly orchardists from those countries here to train them
so they can provide pears that meet our standards.
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When does your pear crop ripen?
Depending on the year, our pears can ripen anywhere from the second week of August to
mid-September. The cooler the growing season is, the faster our pears ripen.
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When does your peach crop ripen?
Our peaches ripen from the beginning of July into August while the weather’s warm.
Unlike pears, peaches ripen faster in warm weather. If we get a cooler fall season, this means the
peach
crop and pear harvest will sometimes run together.
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How do you make sure the best fruit gets into your gifts?
Every peach and pear (the two fruits we grow in our own orchards) is picked by hand
sorted
in the field. We then use a machine to take 17 pictures and sort them again to weed out imperfections,
and finally, before packing, each piece of fruit is looked at one more time, by hand, to ensure only
the
highest-quality fruit is shipped.
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How much fruit do you grow each year?
We grow about 400 tons of Oregold® Peaches, 15,500 tons of Royal Riviera® Pears,
and 800 tons of Bosc pears. The total harvest varies based on weather conditions throughout the year.
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Where do you grow your apples?
The majority of the apples we sell come from quality growers in Washington, since
Washington apples are high quality and can be shipped everywhere in the U.S. From March to July, when
apples aren’t in season there, we send our orchardists and merchants to New Zealand, which
shares
similar climate characteristics to the U.S. Pacific Northwest in many areas.
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What’s a fun fact about a fruit that most people don’t know?
In order to turn orange, citrus fruit needs the cold. When temperatures are too warm at
night, oranges, HoneyBells, and other fruit will stay green—even though they’re perfectly sweet
and delicious. They just don’t take on that beautiful orange hue.
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