Oranges Are Hot Property After Devastating Freeze

Orange pickers lined up by the carload Saturday in La Verne. Picked oranges lined up by the truckload seven miles away in Ontario.

The cars converged on tiny Heritage Park, where more than 10 dozen families came for a do-it-yourself harvest at one of the few San Gabriel Valley groves to escape last month’s devastating freeze.

The trucks were waiting outside a Sunkist citrus juice plant as growers hurried to salvage tons of freeze-damaged navel oranges from groves ravaged by the record-setting cold snap.

Federal agriculture officials say that the nation’s orange crop is down 18% from last month’s forecast, primarily because of California’s hard freeze. The January orange production forecast for the state is off 65% from last year, an Agriculture Department spokesman said Friday.

Sunkist officials said the Ontario plant has been working at full capacity for two weeks to handle the cascade of undersized oranges gathered from withering groves. Although unsuitable as solid fruit, many cold-damaged oranges can be squeezed into juice.

The Ontario plant can handle six truck-and-trailer loads an hour. At one point a week ago, the squeezing machines were 36 hours behind--with trucks lined up for a mile outside the plant, workers said.

In La Verne, it was taking the novice orange-pickers just a few minutes to fill their plastic bags with up to 10 pounds of fruit. Visitors at the 1 1/2-acre Heritage Park grove were assessed $4 each for the bags, about a third of the cost of oranges in some supermarkets.

The 25-year-old orchard escaped last month’s freeze because it sits in a small valley, said City Councilman Craig Walters. A nightly breeze that blows through the valley kept all but the tops of the 200 orange trees from freezing.

Walters, who is president of the La Verne Heritage Foundation, said proceeds from the annual orange sale will go toward maintenance of the park. He said another public picking is planned on Feb. 2.

“I wish I’d brought my husband along to reach some of those big ones up on the top branches,” first-time harvester Carol Gallon of La Verne said as she struggled to keep her oranges from tumbling out of her bag.