Cherry Time in Leelanau!
Today seems like a perfect day to sit inside & eat locally grown cherries! Thankfully Leelanau & Northern Michigan cherry farmers have been hard at work harvesting sweet cherries this week with the tar cherry harvest also staring up. already being picked and tart cherry harvest expected to start soon. UpNorth Live reports on the 2026 cherry harvest:
“We’re pretty excited. We’re starting harvest right now. It seems that a lot of things are getting ripe all at the same time,” Northwest Michigan Horticultural Research Center Coordinator Nikki Rothwell said.
She says, like every year, the weather remains a major factor for growers. “This rain, I’d love it to clear up and move on out,” Rothwell said. “This is weather that really favors fungal development, and so I really want the humidity to drop and hopefully the sun to come back out. We’re hoping that’s going to happen, but yeah, this seems like potential for brown rot.”
Even though there was frost earlier in the growing season, Rothwell says it didn’t have a major impact on this year’s crop.
“The thing about the frost is that it hit us early in April. It just caused a lot of variability in crop size, and so I think that’s what everyone’s trying to grapple with right now,” Rothwell said. “If you’ve got a light block, it’s going to ripen early.”
Rothwell says harvest timing is about on par with a typical year. “We always like to have cherries that are local for the National Cherry Festival, and so we have sweet cherries that are ready right now,” Rothwell said. “I had a grower tell me today here at the center that he feels he’s going to start his Balaton tart cherries this weekend because they’re a light crop.”
On average, Michigan produces about 75% of the nation’s tart cherries, with more than 200 million pounds harvested in a typical year.
No word yet on if the wildfire smoke will have any impact, but conditions like this can spawn thunderstorms so fingers crossed!
Mark shared this photo from East Leland yesterday. He notes that the white residue on the cherries is sulphur, used to combat brown rot! See more from Mark on Facebook and view and purchase his work at Leelanau Landscapes!
