Shoppers in for cherry chop

EARLY-SEASON Tasmanian cherries are being snapped up by locals before the best and biggest ones are exported.

Richmond Cherries sold about 200kg of the luscious-looking glossy red fruit at their Hobart Farm Gate market stall yesterday.

“There’s a lot of excitement about them because they’re the fruit of summer,” said Richmond Cherries’ co-owner, Chris Wisbey.

“You associate Christmas and holidays with cherries. We grow an early variety called Merchant, which is a softer, smaller cherry. It’s an oldfashioned variety.

“They’re not the sexy export variety — the bigger, crunchier varieties that will come later — they are an earlier, pre-Christmas cherry.

“We will get very busy between Christmas and the new year, which is when the Tasmanian season really fires up.”

Mr Wisbey said Tasmania’s cherry season was starting later as growers increasingly planted late-season varieties to coincide with the Chinese New Year when fruit is given as a gift and the end of the cherry seasons in places such as Chile and New Zealand.

“Later and later varieties have come in, which has moved the Tasmanian cherry season to late January, early February,” he said.

This had made it increasingly difficult to meet local demand for Christmas cherries.

“There is a recognition that pre-Christmas cherries are pretty thin on the ground in Tasmania so some of the major players are actually putting in some earlier, pre-Christmas varieties,” said Mr Wisbey, who has 5000 cherry trees at his Richmond farm.

“But they will still be pretty thin on the ground because overall Tasmania has a lighter cherry crop this year.”

Cherry crops had been affected by several factors, including recent rain events, he said.

“It was a bumper crop last year and cherries to an extent are biennial so you will find there are less cherries around this year and therefore the price is likely to go up a bit.

“There have also been some rain events in Tasmania, which haven’t affected us, but they have affected some really early varieties [elsewhere]. The best cherries will go overseas.”