He said this was largely because it was one of the warmest springs in over a decade, which had also made for a great quality crop.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s been great for bringing the trees on early,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had reasonable chilling hours. We had really good pollination days. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe now have quite an awesome crop on the trees.\u201d<\/p>\n
Casey said the fruit\u2019s final quality would be determined by the impacts of El Ni\u00f1o before harvest.<\/p>\n
\u201cIs it going to be wetter for us, which will be damaging for our cherries, or is it going to be nice and dry, in which case we could be expecting one of the best seasons in quite some time?\u201d<\/p>\n
He said an early harvest suited his export-focused business, with most of the cherries destined for overseas before Chinese Lunar New Year sales, which is also a few weeks earlier, on February 6 next year.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s going to be a really good quality export crop this year if everything goes our way.\u201d<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Simon Bishell of Caythorpe Farm in Marlborough grows about 4ha of cherries near Blenheim, alongside a vineyard, sheep and arable operation.<\/p>\n
His cherries are destined for the domestic pre-Christmas market.<\/p>\n
He expected to start picking at the end of November as usual and said this year\u2019s crop was of average size.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis year, particularly [for] some of our earlier varieties, the weather was a little bit changeable at the earlier start or earlier piece of flowering.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo it\u2019s sort of been replicated through in the amount of fruit that is set.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bishell said it was too early to tell what the final harvest quality would be like as cherries are a \u201cvery fragile crop\u201d vulnerable to rain damage.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe hope for a nice fine, settled weather period leading into harvest, and we can ensure that we have a nice supply of good quality summer fruit available for Kiwis to enjoy this summer.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"He said this was largely because it was one of the warmest springs in over a decade, which…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":643880,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[806,49395,138,13976,18660,2245,5346,25689,8594,111,139,69,39480,25690,6921,32259],"class_list":["post-643879","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-as","tag-boosts","tag-business","tag-cherry","tag-crop","tag-early","tag-expected","tag-gianina","tag-harvest","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-prospects","tag-schwanecke","tag-spring","tag-warm"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643879","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=643879"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643879\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/643880"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=643879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=643879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=643879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}