The gleaning season is starting out sweet for a local group of volunteers who harvest crops that otherwise would be left in the field.
A crew from Fields of Grace will descend on Jochen Engelke's Basin City orchard this weekend to pick up to 8 tons of index cherries that he's donating to Second Harvest.
Engelke said he had more fruit than his packer could handle.
"I was shut off picking because of lack of capacity at the packing house," said Engelke, who has 12 acres of cherries, mostly the Chelan variety. "I am stuck with a lot of top quality fruit on the trees with no place to go."
And rather than let the cherries -- which he values at about $16,000 -- rot in the orchard, Engelke and his wife decided to donate them to the food relief network.
"Urgency prevails so we're going to be there (Saturday) with as many volunteers as we can recruit," said Alissa Watkins, program coordinator for Fields of Grace.
Engelke, Watkins and Henry Johnson, Tri-Cities-based food sourcing representative for Second Harvest, figure they have until Tuesday before the cherries get too ripe.
The weekend's picking operation is one of the first for the group this season, Watkins said.
Cherries usually mark the start of the season and Fields of Grace has a few cherry gleaning sessions already scheduled.
Gleaned produce is a small but important part of the food Second Harvest distributes to those in need, Johnson said.
"That's our whole mission is getting as much of this food out to the needy as we can," he said. "Whatever we need to do to bring that about, why, we will."
Engelke said he's never had a quality crop that he hasn't been able to get to market.
"We wouldn't have contemplated donating it if the crop had been of marginal quality," he said.
The cherries likely will be distributed mostly to those in need in the Tri-Cities, Johnson said.
Roger Pepperl, marketing director for Wenatchee-based Stemilt Growers Inc., one of the state's major cherry shippers, said it's not uncommon for some packers to hit capacity when the cherry crop is of normal size or larger.
"We made it through the Chelans, the early cherries, and now we've started on Bings," he said.
This year's overall cherry crop could be a record, as large as 200,000 tons, or 20 million boxes, according to the Washington Field Office of the National Agricultural Statistics Service. That would be 19 percent larger than the previous record of 168,000 tons set in 2006.
Andrew Willis of the Yakima-based Northwest Cherry Growers said retailers across the country are excited about the state's crop this year.
"Shipments have started off strong and ramped up quickly," he said. "There are still lots of retailers in the Midwest and East Coast that are loading up on our cherries for the Fourth of July."
The cherry growers organization is projecting a crop of 16 million to 18 million boxes.
"As I've traveled throughout the market, there's been great color, nice mahogany," Willis said, adding the sugar content is balanced and the "vibrant" green stems make the fruit stand out on shelves.
And it seems the large cherry crop also means more fruit for food banks.
"There certainly are a lot (of cherries)," Watkins said. "It's pretty urgent."
Johnson, while noting Engelke's loss, was thankful for the growers' generosity and that the cherries would go to good use.
"Some needy families are going to be benefiting," he said.
For more information about Fields of Grace visit www.fields-of-grace.com. A schedule of volunteer training sessions is posted online.
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