Cherry season is very near the end here in Mudgee.

Pick your own sweet cherries has it's final run today and tomorrow 8am - 10am. Packed sweet cherries are now sold out.

Morello sour cherries are now available picked or pick your own.

The sunflower patch is now open as well.

Morellos sour cherries

Morellos are now ripe and delicious.

These little sour bombs are packed with flavour. It's a very different fruit to sweet cherries and are very sought after by those in the know.

I'm really enjoying this fruit and learning about how people use it.

Crop quality

After a difficult start with rain there were some amazing cherries come in from the orchard this season - we measured 34 mm+ cherries. As we pick and quality sort direct from each tree without size grading, each box is made up of the natural mix of sizes found on that tree. They have had a difficult run of weather which has had some impact and we graded out a lot this season. Thankfully my gamble on rain protectants paid off and we had some really beautiful fruit to pick.

What happens to blemished or damaged cherries?

We are very grateful we managed to save the Simone variety cherries from the rain. There was more damage than we'd like and so we graded out quite a lot of imperfect cherries. This season it was taking longer (costing more) to grade and pack than it did to pick because of that rain. If we were supplying the major retail chains I don't imagine it would be viable to pick. So thank-you for your support to make it possible for us to pick.

We have sold second grade cherries at the orchard for jam, relish (Cherry Balsamic Relish is a firm favourite in our house), baking or liquers. We pit and freeze them to bake with later when life is a little less chaotic

It was lovely to again have support from several local small family businesses such as Mudgee Homestead who each year bottle 60kg of our cherries for their guests each year (breakfasts and cakes there look delicious!). Kookaburra Estate Farm Kitchen are again making a cherry liquer from our cherries and The Country Plate is creating some delicious treats for their new Rylstone store. This support is really helpful to reduce waste and to recover some of the picking cost.

Some very happy pigs on some Mudgee farms are enjoying a cherry feed from the worst damaged fruit :) Soon you'll find some Stein Farm salami at Robert Stein Winery & Farm that has been cherry fed!

Thank-you

We were really fortunate to have a great team this season who were wonderful to work with. Thank-you to that team for their hard work.

Thank-you for supporting our family farm this season and for following our journey. Apologies to any who missed our delivery runs, in my very sleep deprived late night newsletter writing a few updates stayed in draft rather than send.

A huge thank you to Guy and our boys who stepped into lots of different roles this season from bucket boy to sales to cooking dinner.

Happy to be turning off that 4:30am alarm now and catching up on some sleep.

Wishing you a very happy and safe Christmas break.

Cherry Cheers

Ingrid Roth & family