A Working Vacation

Graham & I are in Grandview, a small town in the Yakima Valley of Eastern Washington, helping my brother and sister-in-law (Dyke & Gloria), with their cherry harvest.  Actually, Graham is helping in the orchard and I am the cook, but I manage to get out in the field and take advantage of unlimited access to fresh Bing cherries.

Bing Cherries Ready for Harvest

The harvest is huge this year – I was born and raised here, and I don’t ever remember seeing the trees loaded as heavily as they are right now.  A large crop translates into low prices to the farmer, but some cherries are worth more than others.  In many orchards the fruit is so thickly packed on the branches that it is small, and it will go to the cannery for a low price.  The large, premium fruit will be packed and sold on the fresh market (and exported), so it commands a higher price.  A farmer gets an intial indication of the “pack out” on his fruit during or shortly after harvest, but he won’t actually get completely paid and know if he has made any money for several months after the season is over.

Harvest is really an exciting time.  We were up by 4:00 and pickers were showing up by 4:30.  On the first morning, Gloria has to check papers and get a W-9 from every picker in the light of the truck headlights, and she had 29 families show up to work.  Most of them are local people or people who have picked for her in years past.  All the neighbors are picking their orchards as well, and by late morning the field man was out to tell us that the warehouse was behind, we had to stop picking, and the warehouse would not accept fruit on Sunday so that they could catch up.  Even so, we delivered 111 bins to the warehouse for processing.

Carmen Mary & Graham - What a Team!

It was a very busy day - all the crew involved with collecting the cherries after they are picked and getting them out of the orchard are equipped with walkie-talkies so that they know where they need to be.  There are two primary goals – make sure the pickers have what they need to keep picking (boxes and trees) and get the fruit to the warehouse as quickly as possible.  Graham was literally running  from one end of the orchard to the other and Gloria was darting about on the quad – moving boxes, helping empty them into bins, directing the pickers to the next row to be picked, calling the swamping crew (they transfer fruit from boxes to bins to the loading area) to tell them where pickup was needed.  Even though the pickers stopped at noon, it took until after 3:00 to get everything to the warehouse.   

Tomorrow it will start all over again, but we will be missing Dyke, who did the loading and hauling.  That will be Graham’s job, along with helping Gloria to keep the crew going.  He is in the orchard now to make sure he is ready to hit the ground running tomorrow. 

Watch for an update tomorrow – and if you have harvest stories, share them here.  There are many people who have never experienced it.

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