It was an idyll of white flowers and buzzing bees in June. In July, it will be popping with bright fruit and filled with U-pickers.
This is Wayne and Edith Smith’s Prairie adventure, their fruit farm of the same name, where the 1,000 dwarf sour cherry trees they grow have shed their spring blossoms and will soon be hung with fruit.
Planting a cherry orchard was how they chose to have fun during retirement, say the Smiths who moved here in 2002 and decided they’d rather grow something, than put their feet up.
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“I just didn’t want to spend my time reading the paper and golfing,” said Wayne, who now spends his days pruning, keeping the weeds at bay and getting their two-acre orchard ready for a short harvest season in mid-July.
You could say it’s kind of a “romantic” thing to be doing too. The five varieties of dwarf sour cherries he and his wife chose to grow are all of the University of Saskatchewan’s Romance series, aptly named Romeo, Juliet, Cupid, Valentine and Crimson Passion.
These varieties were released from the University of Saskatchewan in 2004, where work has been underway since the 1940s to develop shorter cherry trees with great-tasting fruit and high sugar content while being hardy enough to withstand the Prairies’ cold winters.
The Smiths first learned of them by attending lectures by Bob Bors, assistant professor of plant science at the university, studying his production manual Dwarf Sour Cherries: A Guide for Commercial Production and consulting with Manitoba’s fruit specialist Anthony Mintenko.
They started planting in 2005. They know they went out on a limb to pick a thing this new to try, Edith said. Even today, there are very few growers of cherries in Manitoba and most have only a couple hundred trees, according to Mintenko.
“We just wanted to try something that other people weren’t doing yet,” said Edith. “This was a niche market that no one was filling.”
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Today Manitobans are filling their cherry pies with Smiths’ fruit, plucked from an orchard that’s been as successful as the couple growing it could ever have imagined.
Most mature trees are actually two to three feet taller than these varieties are expected to get. They are expecting to harvest about 2,000 lbs. of fruit this year, and about half that much more again next year.
“In perfect conditions we could get 24,000 pounds, but that’ll never happen,” she says.
“It seems to have worked out for us fairly well,” adds Wayne.
But idyllic as owning a cherry orchard might sound, it’s also plenty of work.
Keeping down bird predation has proven their biggest challenge, says Wayne.
They have rigged up their own system to cover up their youngest trees and those the U-pickers will be in, but it isn’t a perfect system. But they appear now to have enough fruit to keep the birds happy and leave some left over for them.
“When we started the birds would strip a tree in nothing flat,” says Edith. “They do some damage but there’s enough production now that we can get away with not having a mass of protection.”
They’re not troubled by any other pests, but are keeping an eye out for a fly also known as Spotted Wing Drosophila that’s done damage to cherry production in the U.S.
Harvest generally begins the third week of July and lasts about two weeks.
That’s when the U-pickers arrive and their orchard becomes a lively and frequently multicultural place. Word of mouth spread quickly among Winnipeg’s ethnic communities that fresh sour cherries are now grown in Manitoba. They hear many languages spoken, including Polish, Hungarian, German, Ukrainian, among their customers.
“The Eastern European people in Winnipeg really know these cherries,” says Edith.
But they aren’t as familiar to others. The “sour” reference has added some challenges to familiarizing eaters with them.
These cherries won’t make you pucker, but the “sour” reference does make Edith pout.
“I prefer to call them tart cherries,” she said. “As you eat them, you’ll get that sweetness, and then a little bit of zing flavour to them. But if you freeze them, or cook with them, then that real cherry flavour just pops out of them.”
That’s why sour cherries varieties are those used by cherry pie filling makers who find them most suited to processing, she adds.
Presently, about 35 per cent of their harvest goes home with U-pickers and the rest is sold through direct marketing and to Crampton’s Market and Tall Grass Prairie in Winnipeg.
They bought a pitter to be able to sell pre-picked pails of pitted cherries, but have just tinkered so far with doing some value-added products. They’ve heard Dr. Oz enthuse about the attributes of cherry juice as a sleep aid, says the couple.
“We’ve tried it. It works,” said Edith.
