Gigantic, sweet red cherries are starting to come off trees around Flathead Lake as the annual cherry harvest gets under way.

Growers throughout the area have begun harvesting their cherries, although not every grower is picking yet.

Overall, this year’s harvest is anticipated to be outstanding, growers and cherry experts say.

The 90 or so members of the Flathead Lake Cherry Growers Association are expected to deliver 3 million pounds of cherries to the cooperative’s warehouse at Finley Point this year, association President Dale Nelson said.

That’s up from about 2.2 million pounds last year.

The warehouse opened Monday and one semi tractor-trailer load of cherries left that day bound for the Monson Fruit Co. in Selah, Wash., with a second semi taking off Tuesday, Nelson said.

Only three growers delivered cherries the first day, but that number doubled on day two.

“More growers keep coming in every day,” Monson Fruit Co. Field Representative Brian Campbell said.

Early arrivals are Lambert cherries, with lapins soon to follow, the two men said.

Campbell, Nelson and local County Extension Agent Pat McGlynn all said this year’s fruit “looks great.”

Growers Gary Hoover and Louise Swanberg agreed.

“I have some beautiful fruit,” Hoover said, “not as much as I’d like.”

Hoover’s orchard experienced “a pretty good drop” this year. Often, if trees get too heavy with too much fruit, some of it simply drops off.

He said some of his trees have branches touching the ground because they’re so loaded with fruit.

Nelson attributes this year’s large-size fruit to heavy June rain.

“All that rain pumped them up,” he said.

Co-op members with orchards on the south shore and at Finley Point started picking a few days ago, Nelson said.

Swanberg, whose orchard is on the west shore, started picking Saturday and opened her roadside stand, The Cherry Haus, last weekend.

Hoover said he won’t pick at his Orchard Estates at Yellow Bay until the middle of next week. Most of Hoover’s trees are lapins, which ripen later than Lamberts.

Hoover plans to stop watering his orchard about a week before picking cherries. That allows the sugar to store up in the fruit and make the cherries especially sweet, he said.

“I said it would be the first of August before I picked this year,” Hoover said, recalling his late start of Aug. 6 last year for a few select trees.

He will open his roadside Gary’s Cherries stand Aug. 4 or 5, ensuring that the cherries sold there are sugared up and sweet.

“People want sweet cherries, not pie cherries,” Hoover said.

Grower Allen Rodgers, who has Silver Bear Orchard at Bear Dance, expected to start picking Rainier cherries at his three orchards today. Within a couple of days, he said the bings, lapins and Lamberts would all be coming off, too.

Rodgers operates one conventional orchard that is in the cooperative. His other two orchards are organic and those cherries are not sold through the co-op.

“I have beautiful, superb cherries this year,” he said.

Swanberg said all the growers she has talked to are reporting “great crops. Nobody seems to have a light crop. Some do have average, though.”

Again this year, Flathead cherries will be sold at grocery stores throughout the Flathead Valley, around Montana, Idaho, Wyoming and North Dakota, Nelson said.

Last year, co-op members reached an agreement with Charlie’s Produce, a Spokane distributor, to deliver smaller quantities of cherries to regional grocery stores.

This year’s promotion of those sales started months ago, Nelson said, with newspaper advertising and promotional materials in stores touting the pending arrival of Flathead cherries.

Nelson said Charlie’s Produce will deliver cherries to area stores this week.

Some local grocery stores strike deals directly with growers and Smith’s in Kalispell already has local cherries for sale.

This year, cherries are being shipped in premium boxes promoting Montana, not the more generic Northwest cherry boxes used in past years, Nelson said.

Hoover already has orders to ship 65 boxes of cherries to individual customers around the United States. He ships in 10-pound priority-mail boxes that he customizes to better accommodate cherries.

“I’ve got one guy in Kansas who has already ordered and paid for 11 boxes of cherries this year,” he said.

Hoover is confident he will fill all the mail-order requests he’s received, except possibly one from a 92-year-old man in Colorado. The man, a repeat customer, this year asked Hoover to ship cherries to his two sisters-in-law, but only if Hoover could find cherries “that the birds had dirtied on.”

“I told him I didn’t have those kind of cherries,” Hoover said with a laugh.

Nearly all the cherries delivered to the cooperative’s warehouse should be there by Aug. 8 or 9, Campbell said. It will be another week after that before the growers who raise sweetheart cherries deliver that crop. Sweethearts are the latest-ripening variety of cherry currently grown in the valley.

The cooperative’s warehouse will be open until sometime after Aug. 14, Nelson said. The sweetheart cherries won’t be ready to pick until around Aug. 12 and the warehouse stays open for co-op members with that variety.

Cherries grown in Washington are still being picked and sold around the region, Campbell said. But the timing of the Flathead harvest is just about perfect this year, ensuring that “we’ll be able to sell all of our crop.”

The Flathead Valley “dodged bullets, weather-wise,” Campbell said. The helicopters that are hired to be on standby to blow water off trees in the event of rain did get called out a couple of Sundays ago, but no serious crop damage has been reported to McGlynn or Campbell.

And, with a “good” weather forecast — which means no rain — for the next week or so, they say this year’s crop could be safe. “It’s going to be a great year,” Swanberg said.

Reporter Shelley Ridenour may be reached at 758-4439 or sridenour@dailyinterlake.com.