Cherry Picking at Belltown Hill Orchards, South Glastonbury, CT – 2011

I’m going to be straight with you right up front. This story has an unfortunate ending. You’ll see by the last picture.

Guess what today is. That’s right, it’s opening day of cherry picking at Belltown Hill Orchards in South Glastonbury, CT. We wait for this day all year and when it comes, we hop in the car and head over to the farm for some serious cherry picking. This year I wasn’t messing around. I was planning on at least five pounds of cherries. If last year was any indication (which it wasn’t), we could have them all picked and packed in no time flat. They are big and juicy and aren’t very difficult to pluck from the trees. Well, there is some downtime used for taking breaks to stuff thy face.

Okay, without further ado (learn about “Ado” Versus “Adieu”), I’ll get to the point.

We got in the car and drove to the farm. There were more cars than we are used to. It was opening day after all. As we were gathering the buckets we would use to hold our cherries, I overheard someone asking something to the guy who worked the front table. I didn’t hear the question, but I heard the answer. It was something like, “…I told them the best thing to have done was to have shown up this morning.” I didn’t know what that meant, but I quickly learned as we started looking at the cherries on the trees.

Split cherries. Too much rain. Apparently, when the Spring season gets too much rain, cherry trees don’t know when to say when. They keep absorbing and actually burst the cherries. It’s a real shame because the cherries were sweet and just as delicious as any other year. The only problem was that they are somewhat useless. We were unfortunately unable to harvest any cherries this year. We left with a mere ounce or two of eaten cherries in our tiny hungry stomachs.

I feel bad for the farm. These are gorgeous trees on gorgeous land. We can only hope for a dry warm Spring next year.