Green Bluff ready for the picking as growers ensure safety during pandemic

The popular Cherry Pickers Trot and cherry pit spit contest in Green Bluff may have been canceled this year due to COVID-19, but the many orchards in the area north of Spokane are still open for people who want to pick cherries, strawberries, peaches or other produce.

Regular visitors will notice a few changes, however, as orchards institute new sanitizing measures and protocols.

Sunset Orchard currently has six varieties of cherries available for picking. Employees wear masks and gloves and orchard manager Kingston Nelson said they’re doing their best to keep everything clean.

“We’re requiring the use of masks and gloves to use our ladders,” he said. “We have masks and gloves available if people don’t have their own. We’re sanitizing our buckets between every use.”

People seem to be understanding about the new restrictions, Nelson said.

“I haven’t had any bad customer complaints about it,” he said. “With U-pick, it’s not that hard to maintain social distancing.”

But while picking is still happening, Nelson said the number of people seems to be lower than usual. The orchard, like most other orchards in Green Bluff, relies on large events like the Cherry Pickers Trot to draw people .

“It’s going to have a big impact on all the farmers in terms of revenue,” Nelson said. “We have our established customers already, but we’re always looking for new ones.”

Sally Montgomery and seven other family members were in Green Bluff to pick cherries and strawberries Saturday. They made the drive from the Sandpoint area to gather pie cherries for canning and strawberries for jam.

“We’ve been coming up here for 20 some years,” Montgomery said. “We pick cherries and in the fall we pick pumpkins and apples.”

The pandemic didn’t deter them from coming, and they noticed the precautions the orchard was taking. Montgomery said there seemed to be fewer people picking than normal.

“It’s quieter,” she said.

Todd Beck, owner of Beck’s Harvest House, said his store used curbside pickup of pies and its popular pumpkin donuts during the early months of the pandemic to survive.

“I was blown away by the support we got from our customers,” he said.

When the shop and orchard were able to open again, Beck said he noticed people seem to be buying larger amounts of fruit and produce.

“The demand for food is high,” he said. “People are doing more canning this year.”

Beck said he’s been working to make his store less crowded, partly by creating the Fruit Fort down the hill from the main store. It’s an open-sided building where Beck has put all his peaches and other fresh produce in an effort to reduce congestion in the main store. It was not unusual for people to crowd shoulder-to-shoulder in the store during peak peach season, Beck said.

In addition to pumpkin donuts, the store also sells ice cream, pies and other items. Picnic tables are now scattered across a large area so people can maintain social distancing while they eat.

“Every time someone gets up from a table, it’s sanitized,” he said.

Beck said he’s lucky to have space to work with. “I’ve got 37 acres here,” he said. “We have the ability to really spread out. I think that really helps the safety factor. We’re being proactive. I’m not waiting for someone to get sick.”

The Cherry Pickers Trot is hosted every year by the Green Bluff Growers Association. The growers made the decision to cancel the event even though it is the association’s only fundraiser all year, Beck said.

“We just didn’t feel it was responsible to bring 5,000 people together,” he said. “Green Bluff is still open.”

Green Bluff usually goes all out for its annual fall Harvest Festival, when orchards bring in petting zoos, live music, food trucks and plenty of other family-friendly activities.

Beck said he’s already making plans to cut his corn maze in a way that allows people to maintain social distancing. But even then, no one is quite sure what this year’s Harvest Festival will entail amid a pandemic.

“Internally, we have a lot of different plans depending on where we are,” Beck said. “People still need their fruit. People still need their pumpkins. Fall Harvest Festival, for some people, is an important annual tradition.”

The Harvest Festival should go on in some form “barring an absolute catastrophe,” Beck said.

“It’s not going to be the same,” he said. “We have to accept the fact that not everything will be like it was.”

Nelson said there are always concerns about what can go wrong, but usually it’s the weather that’s the problem, not a pandemic.

“The worry is always there,” he said. “Farming is never a guaranteed thing.”