Stone fruit season is officially in full effect! This includes cherries, peaches, nectarines, plums and apricots. The great thing for us as the consumer, is that stone fruit are easy for us to buy. (Unlike a melon, where you have to use your own science or wives tale to figure out how it is going to taste, stone fruit are pretty straight forward.) For growers and packers, they also benefit from the similar processes used in the harvesting and packing stone fruit operations.
Selecting Stone Fruit
For peaches, nectarines, plums and apricots, we can tell when they are ripe and ready-to-eat when they are soft. We can also tell when they are hard and they are not yet ready. That also allows us to plan accordingly, so we can buy some that are ripe and some that are not quite ripe yet to ripen on the counter in time to eat when we run out of the ripe fruit. Or, we can just buy all ripe fruit (if that is an option) and keep them in the fridge to eat when we are ready. It is the same concept that you might be accustomed to doing with avocados!
Cherries are the exception. Cherries are the only stone fruit that are non-climacteric and do not continue ripening after harvest. They reach their full ripeness potential on the tree and then continue aging from there. With cherries, firmness is key when choosing which to buy because they soften with age.
If you are interested in learning more specific details about how to select and store the different stone fruit items, check out the following posts:
Packing & Harvesting Stone Fruit
Not only is it important for us to appreciate how good all of the stone fruit tastes, but also all of the work that it took to get that stone fruit into our hands! Over the years of doing this blog, I have been able to accumulate the following harvesting and packing stone fruit content.
Peach Harvest & Packing
You can see the full process from harvest to packing with peaches. This video is also particularly exciting because you get to see the peaches being waxed.
Cherry Harvest & Packing
These were the first videos I ever made for the blog, so hopefully you can see some progress! Between the two, you can see the harvesting and packing of cherries. One really cool thing that not a lot of people know is how cherries actually grow in bunches on the tree. You can see in the videos how they grow, and also how they are individualized at the packing level.
Plum Packing
This plum packinghouse is the same as the one that is showed above in the peach harvest and packing video. However, you will notice that the plums at this operation do not receive the wax coating, like the peaches do.
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Thank you so much for your great website! I recently bought a small stone fruit and apple orchard and am having trouble finding the correct containers to sell our peaches in to our local co op. Do you have any suggestions on who to contact for a small grower such as myself?
Any help is appreciated-