Lower Hope Fruit

Cherries – Here at Lower Hope we have been growing cherries since 1994. We grow the best dark sweet cherry varieties and specialise in late season production. Our cherries are available from July to early September. Picking normally begins on 1st July and finishes at the beginning of September. The challenge is to harvest over 40 million cherries in these short weeks. The skill of cherry growing is to decide when each variety of cherry is ripe enough to pick. Too early and the cherry will taste sour, too late and the whole crop spoil before it can be picked and packed. So timing of this task is of great importance to the success of the whole operation.

Raspberries – We have a mix of soil grown and also substrate (pot) grown raspberries. Traditionally the soil grown raspberries crop twice a year known as ‘floricane’ and ‘primocane’ crops. The variety we grow ‘Driscolls Maravilla’ is a tasty large, sweet berry. Raspberries are picked directly into the punnets. It is a very delicate process to pick raspberries and get them off the plug without damaging the fruit or causing bruising. Raspberries ripen gradually so we will pick everyday or every other day the fruit is ripe. We pick when the colour is still slightly pinky/red so that we can get it to the customers in perfect condition.

Apples – The Opal apple tree planting began in 2015. These are a modern ‘club’ dessert apple that is yellow in colour. They are a niche apple and the planting of them is restricted to the ‘club’. They are crunchy and sweet, but are not a mainstream apple – they are for customers who want to try something new. Opal is a later season apple variety and is picked in October. We pick in ‘trains’ where the apple bins move along the row on a tractor and and trailer.