Good evening,

Cherry time is getting closer at Roth Family Orchard Mudgee and we are looking forward to seeing you at the orchard or at one of our Cherry Express runs this season.  

The Cherry Chatter will bring you occasional updates on the season and we'll first announce here when bookings open.  

If you'd rather not follow us this cherry season you can hit unsubscribe below.

We had beautiful blossom this season.  A warm spell in August had the apricots burst into bloom very early, it was then cool for a few weeks which gave a delay before the cherries flowered, and the sour cherries were much later.  

Conditions during blossom were better than recent years, we hired in plenty of bees and there were also lots of other insects helping with pollination.

FRUIT SET UPDATE

A little update on our main varieties. With the weather swinging between hot and cold it’s hard to predict when they will ripen. 

Cherries 

·       Merchant - good crop load. Expect to have boxed sales of these late November (no pick your own in these few rows)

·       Samba - very little crop, not open for picking this year. Such a beautiful cherry but a temperamental variety.

·       Rons & Vans – great looking crop, some shedding but that’s common with Rons, plenty growing well. Hope to open for boxed sales & pick your own around 5 Dec

·       Simones - overall a good looking crop, though the fruit set is quite variable between trees – some are loaded and some have much less.  Expecting to be ripe from around 10 Dec. 

Sour cherries

Morellos sour cherries have a big crop. They blossomed later and I’m expecting these may ripen after Christmas.

Apricots

The apricots are looking fabulous this season.  They flowered quite early, before some big frosts which had me a bit worried but they came through and have had so much fruit we were out thinning some varieties last week.

First to ripen will be the Wondercots – they are big, beautiful and close to ripe – expect we will have these ready late next week or the week after. The Magiccots and Lillycots follow towards the end of November.

MARKETS 

We’re hoping to be at the Mudgee Farmers’ 20 year anniversary Twilight market on 22 November as our first market of the season.  

CHERRY EXPRESS

The cherry express will run again in 2025 ! 

If the cherries cooperate, we are aiming for runs to Gunnedah /Boggabri/ Narrabri / Moree, Scone/Morpeth and Blue Mountains / Sydney from around 11 Dec to 19 Dec (depending on ripening).  We will open orders close to the time.  

PICK YOUR OWN CHERRIES  

At this stage we expect to open the pick-your-own cherry season around 5 December, depending on ripening of the cherries.   

Bookings will open soon – I will send a Cherry Chatter when they do.  

New this year - we have some great little pails for kids' picking buckets - you can purchase at entry (including cherries) so the kids can keep their own cherries - and you can manage how many cherries they pick :)

KEEPING BUSY IN THE OFF SEASON

Out of season we’ve been busy with pruning, nutrition and irrigation repairs.  

Some pruning started back last December and then a bit of mechanical hedging to open trees up to light in over the summer before doing hand pruning each tree over autumn and early spring. 

We’ve done some major renewal pruning in parts of the orchard – bringing in chainsaws to cut out older limbs damaged by the drought years.  Renewal is a staggered process, working on sections of the orchard in different years.  A trial plot I worked on with a heavy renewal prune three years ago and training new growth to an upright fruiting limbs system is coming into fruit this year, hopefully full production next year.  

Our trial of Santina cherries trained on a modified UFO trellis system is also fruiting this season. It’s been an interesting learning curve on this training system.  

We’ll hope for a clear run of weather through late November - December and look forward to seeing you with plenty of delicious cherries.

Kind regards

Ingrid Roth

Cherry Grower

Roth Family Orchard

108 Eurunderee Lane

Mudgee

farm@roth.net.au