Cherry season is winding down for Flathead Cherry Growers, but “we harvested and shipped 1.6-million pounds of cherries as of today,” Brian Campbell said Monday.

Fortunately for fruit lovers, the cherry stands along the east and west shores of Flathead Lake probably will be open for another couple of weeks.

Campbell, a field representative for Monson Fruit in Selah, Wash. and a cherry grower himself, said overall it was not a good season for the cherry crop because of all the damage wrought by recent wind storms and rain.

Wind can cause wind damage and bruising, Campbell said. When the cherries are not as ripe, as was the case about three weeks ago at Blue Bay, wind causes scarring.

Rain splits the cherries because they absorb the water and then burst. With a heavy rain, the growers have to give the cherries a 24-hour period to dry out. The fruit needs time to equalize and for the rain water to dissipate, Campbell said. They won’t develop new splits until 12 hours after the rain.

“We’ve had just about everything we can throw at the cherries,” he said.

Back in the “good old days,” when about 25 to 30 percent of the crop was in the cooler, every third cherry had to be discarded by hand-sorters. That slowed the volume of packing way down. With the new methodology and technology Monson Fruit has implemented, packing is much faster. Campbell says cameras take 32 pictures of each cherry and never miss quickly discarding a split or bruised one.

Along with Monson’s new technology, the Flathead Cherry Growers have extra ways they market their cherries. One is the Montana box.

Ripe, luscious cherries are packed into boxes labeled Montana Flathead Cherries, and the coop sells these boxes to Costco, Walmart and other big grocers, who get premium prices for these boxes, usually $1 more per pound than the Washington growers received.

The cull cherries – those that are misshapen, small, bruised or scarred – are also sold to customers who press the cherries for juice. Red Lodge Ales bought 400,000 pounds of these cherries; Northwest Mobile also purchases culls for juicing.

So enjoy the last of 2025’s Flathead Lake cherries or freeze some to add cheer to a snowy February day.