Plucking Fruit From Limb Sweetens Season for Cherry Lovers

Big John Mayfield was just about picked clean. But he wasn’t complaining. In fact, he was encouraging visitors to pluck the season’s last gleaming red cherries from the upper limbs of his orchard in Leona Valley. The pickers had to climb ladders to reach the few clusters still clinging to the highest branches. This was the season’s last--some say its sweetest--fruit.

A few weeks earlier, Mayfield and Leona Valley’s other “U-Pick” growers had opened their gates to hordes of cherry lovers. Even the lowest branches were then thick with fruit, drooping under its weight.

But like a lot of life’s pleasures, cherry season just didn’t last long enough.

It began a couple of months earlier when delicate white cherry blossoms burst open to signal the beginning of spring. Soon, the petals gave way to tiny round fruit. By early June, the sweet cherries were ripe.

Most of Los Angeles County is too warm to support cherry trees, which need plenty of freezing weather each winter to produce fruit. But Leona Valley, tucked up against the mountains west of Palmdale and no stranger to snow, is fertile ground for cherries. Each spring, the little town celebrates the opening of picking season with a parade.

Winter temperatures and rainfall affect the size of the crop. In a good year, cherry-picking season may last seven or eight weeks. A more modest crop, such as this year’s, lasts only three weeks.

During the first two weekends this month, thousands of visitors invaded Big John’s Orchard, snapping up much of his crop.

By a recent afternoon, many branches were bare, and only about two dozen pickers showed up for the last of the harvest. The price was a buck a pound.

Trish Reilly of Valencia and her four children found slim pickings.

“You’ve got to go pretty high (to find branches with cherries) on this farm,” she said.

To reach the upper branches, Reilly, who was visibly pregnant, scaled an aluminum ladder. “I’m not afraid,” she said. But she quickly added: “My OB would kill me. . . . “

Still, the work was worth it. “Fruit’s always better off the tree,” Reilly said. “It’s always better here than at the market.”

Nearby, Judith Flowers of Monrovia was using one hand to hold the leash attached to her frisky dachshund. Her other hand steadied the ladder her 12-year-old son Nathan had climbed to pick cherries.

She watched as he devoured some of the fruits of his labor. “One in the mouth, two in the bucket,” she said laughing. “That’s why this is taking so long.”

For Flowers, the visit to Leona Valley was a trip down memory lane. As a youngster, she picked plenty of cherries here, usually by climbing the trees--a technique that Big John forbids because of the risk to pickers and tree limbs.

“I was raised up here,” Flowers said. “My father was one of the people who planted the first big cherry orchard in Leona Valley. . . . For me, it’s coming back once a year and doing what I did in my childhood.”

She gazed into the branches where her son was busy. “The ones at the top are the best because they get the most sunshine, and they last the longest,” she explained. “I’d like to get that cluster up there, but it’s out of reach.”

*

Flowers said her son appears to have inherited her affection for cherry picking. “Even though it’s a lot of work, he asks to come back each year,” she said.

A few trees away, Leslie Smoot, who runs a day-care center in Lancaster, was riding herd over 20 children and adults who were on a cherry-picking field trip. She was having a tough time keeping the younger kids from climbing the trees.

“Big John said it was better if they gathered the (cherries) on the ground,” Smoot said. “He won’t charge us for them.”

At the checkout counter, Norman Lobo of Northridge strode up with 18 pounds of the fruit, which he planned to serve at his church’s potluck dinner. It had taken him two hours to pick.

“You take one of these cans, stick it around your neck and drop it in with both hands,” he explained. “You have to get up high to get the good ones. If you’re afraid of heights, forget it.”

Another customer approached Big John himself with a more modest pail of pickings. “That should do me,” the visitor said.

“Not quite,” replied the orchard owner, as he grabbed a machete-sized knife and brought it down with a loud whack.

A thick red slice of watermelon fell over on the cutting board. Big John grinned and handed the sample to his customer.

Tanned, wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt stained with dust and fruit juice, Big John Mayfield, 63, looks like a hard-working farmer. Producing fruit, vegetables and honey was once merely a hobby. Now it consumes much of his life.

As a contractor, Mayfield says he helped build thousands of tract houses in the west San Fernando Valley. Later, he specialized in building custom homes.

He’s lived in Leona Valley since 1959 and bought his cherry orchard 17 years ago. Now it’s grown to 265 trees and Mayfield is just about retired from the building business.

His cherry season is over now. But Mayfield plans to keep his roadside stand open, selling the honey he gets from his 200 beehives. Pretty soon, he will add the watermelons, tomatoes and bell peppers he is growing across the street. Soon afterward, his Asian pears will be ripe.

Mayfield’s goal? To keep the stand open until October, when the pumpkins will be ready for harvest.

“It sounds silly, but I’m not in it for the money,” he says. “I always wanted to be a farmer. I don’t care if I ever build another house.”