DOOR COUNTY, Wis. — One of the payoffs of months of work is opening day for pick-your-own cherries at Meleddy Cherry Orchard.
It didn’t take long Tuesday for visitors at the farm near Sturgeon Bay to fill white buckets full of red cherries.
“The quality is pretty darn good,” said Tom Selvick, who owns the farm with his wife, Sue. “We had a massive amount of rain, actually more than we needed, but there are a lot of cherries on the trees, that’s for sure.”
Meleddy is in southern Door County near Sturgeon Bay. Selvick said in addition to the rain, this year’s crop weathered some usually warm winter weather.
“We did have some challenges early,” he said. “We had some pretty warm weather where we were worried about the trees activating, then you could have problems with all the buds freezing off later. It’s going to get cold at some point. But as it turned out, for the most part, we’ve got an above average crop. Pretty heavy in spots, too.”
Last year Wisconsin produced 10 million pounds of tart cherries — down 19% from 2022.
Pick-your-own-cherries are also one of the tourist draws in the county. It’s a bucket list activity for Jenni Byrne from Temple, Texas.
“I am up here on vacation and we came up a little bit earlier than I expected because my sister-in-law called and said that this is the cherry picking time,” she said while filling a bucket with cherries at Meleddy. “We had mentioned last year that we really wanted to come and do cherry picking.”
Sweet cherry picking opened at some orchards in the past few weeks, with tart cherry picking just getting underway at other locations.
“My sister-in-law is picking some to put in a pie tonight,” Byrne said. “I’m picking some to be able to take back to Texas so that my friends and co-workers can have a little bit of actual cherry cherries.”
Selvick sees the blend of agriculture and tourism at the orchard in their summer.
“I’ll be 74 next month and as long as I can remember it was Cherryland,” he said about one of the nicknames for Door County.
