As cherry season enters its last few delectable weeks, Te Radar and Ruth Spencer pay tribute to the jewel of the Kiwi fruit bowl.
Picking cherries is one of the more idyllic jobs, if you can overlook the parts that are hard work. The sunlight dapples through the tightly clustered leaves. Deep red, the cherries nestle like rubies in the branches, firm and round and glossy. A particularly plump and shiny one catches your eye, heart-shaped, beautiful and you know it would fetch a premium price on the luxury export market. A perfect New Zealand cherry is the best of the best. But you're alone up a ladder, deep in the lush branches, and there are hundreds more perfect cherries all around you. For one precious moment in time, you eat like a billionaire.
You won't work like a billionaire, though. It's cold at 6am in a cherry orchard, with the chilly dew still on the leaves, and then it gets hot. Generally, you're wearing your bucket around your shoulders and that gets heavy. You have to shift the ladder a lot. And there's the occupational hazard of getting sick of cherries. That's not a risk you run at a broccoli harvest.
We've been growing cherries commercially for well over a hundred years in New Zealand. In 1912, the Pouerty Bay Herald advertised cherry-picking as an ideal job for the young working man, as the season begins just as shearing is winding up. There was more manpower needed, it claimed, for 20 acres of cherry orchard than was needed for shearing 20,000 sheep. The young man of 1912 could hang up his black wool singlet and get back into his cotton shirtsleeves for a season among the cherries, hopefully after a thorough washing of hands. By the 1920s, cherry growing employed more people per acre than any other primary industry. Despite surplus Australian cherries frequently being dumped on our market, undercutting the local growers, the industry valiantly persisted.
Australians are not the only enemies of the perfect New Zealand cherry. Cherries can't grow just anywhere; they need cold winters and hot, dry summers. Eighty-five per cent of our cherries are grown in Central Otago, with some also grown in Marlborough. Rain, if it comes during fruiting, ruins the cherries in two ways: it pools around the stems causing splitting; and it soaks up into the fruit via the tree roots, making the cherries softer and less able to handle transport. Various methods exist to cope with rain, such as plastic sheeting above the trees, but you have to balance shelter with airflow.
The most fun way to dry rained-on cherries is by helicopter but it's also the most expensive. Cherries are also susceptible to hail damage – there's not a helicopter on earth that can fix that. Someone's probably working on one, though, so if you see a mysterious drone attached to a hairdryer in the sky, it's probably a cherry grower having a go.
Another UFO helping cherry crops is the Upright Fruiting Offshoot system. It's basically espaliered cherries, where they're grown horizontally along wire trellises instead of being allowed to spread into bushier trees. This makes them easier to shield from rain as you don't need to cover so much of the orchard. It also lets the sunlight and breeze get through more evenly and makes the cherries more accessible to pickers.
Split cherries still taste good but they're prone to rot quickly. Growers are always looking for other options other than wasting fruit – some goes to juice; and in the future, we'll see more innovations in the supermarket. Freeze-dried, dehydrated and snap-frozen cherries for smoothies are all being investigated for their potential.
Cherry growers also tweak the crop to better handle both the climate and the markets. If you're over a certain age, you might have noticed the vanishing of the old varieties, such as the huge black Bing and the supermarket standard Dawson. They've been replaced over the years with varieties that stand up better to transport and weather, such as Sweetheart and Lapin. We need transport-stable cherries as most of our crop is exported, as much as 80 per cent going overseas to places like Taiwan and China.
These newer varieties last wonderfully in the fruit bowl here, too, meaning that the cost of a kilogram is a more justifiable investment than in the days when you'd have to wolf them down within a day or two. Growers tend to produce several different varieties that fruit at different times to stagger the season, which means now you can get cherries from November to February.
Cherries are temperamental beauties and quite a lot of hard work. From helicopters to birds, come hail or high water, they often push their growers to the limit. But the result is something exquisite, the jewel of the Christmas table, the ornament of picnics and potlucks, representing summer and freshness and celebration. And living in New Zealand means we can taste the same perfect, luxury cherry an overseas billionaire does – only a little bit fresher.
Extracted with permission from Kiwi Country, Rural New Zealand in 100 objects, by Te Radar and Ruth Spencer (Harper Collins Aotearoa New Zealand).
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