Cherries Jubilee

Edward Levitt fancies himself a gentleman farmer.

At the height of cherry season each year, the 82-year-old retired animator opens up Sandberg U-Pick Cherry Farm to the public to pluck the fruit from nearly 1,000 trees on the 130-acre property nestled in the foothills of the Angeles National Forest.

Levitt’s orchard is just one of several pick-your-own cherry farms in and around Leona Valley.

“People are bananas about cherries,” Levitt said, sitting in an overstuffed armchair on his screened front porch across from the orchard. “It’s not profitable, we’re always in the red. But I still find it very satisfying.”

So do Arthur and Peggy Bender of Studio City, who first visited the orchard while on a date 12 years ago. Now they bring their two children, Chasen, 6, and Jade, 10 months, to the orchard on outings.

“It’s a good family adventure,” Arthur Bender said. “I love to see the smiles on my kids’ faces mixed with cherry juice.”

“It is so simplistic picking cherries,” Peggy Bender said. “You get time to talk, relax and spend time together as a family. There isn’t all the hustle and bustle that is in the city.”

Getting away from city life was on Levitt’s mind as well when he began to look for a farm.

“My wife and I were on a trip through Canada and we pulled off the highway to pick blackberries,” he said. “I looked up and saw this farmhouse with smoke coming out of the chimney and I thought, ‘People really do live in the country.’ ”

With that bucolic image in mind, Levitt returned home to North Hollywood and soon after began looking at farms.

“I kept looking until I found something that no one else wanted to buy,” Levitt said.

Levitt and his wife, Dorothy, eventually bought the 85-year-old Sandberg Homestead in 1960 because of its 200 apple trees and its location 4,000 feet above sea level. The freezing temperatures at higher elevations are ideal for cherry crops, he said.

“I only planted 12 cherry trees to start,” he said. “The birds got the first crop and I decided to plant some more and couldn’t stop. I just kept on planting trees.”

The Levitts have become experts in all things cherry. They make cherry wine, cherry jelly, cherry jam and cherry preserves. Even a porch chair is covered with a cherry-printed slipcover.

The Levitts’ three adult sons and their children help tend the crops and give pickers 3-pound coffee cans for toting the fruit of their labors.

El Nino-powered winter storms delayed this year’s harvest, but the cherries are still plentiful, Levitt said.

“We got lots of rain, drizzle and snow,” he said. “The crop is a month behind. We usually begin selling cherries in early June, but now we’re beginning to sell them in July.”

For Levitt, life on the farm has been all he had hoped it would be.

“I haven’t wanted to move anywhere else,” he said.