From the Fields: John Tenerelli, ​​​​​​​Los Angeles County tree fruit grower

By John Tenerelli
Los Angeles County tree fruit grower

We finished pruning all the trees. There are no blooms yet. The cherries won’t blossom till the end of March. Mostly everything else will start blossoming in about the middle of March. We’re going to spray copper for disease, and we’ve cleared out some orchards that were old. We’re picking up the firewood and stacking it. 

Blooms need a bit of moisture in the ground, so we’re starting to irrigate. We normally get about 5 inches of rain a year because we’re in the high desert, but we haven’t even had an inch this year. LA normally gets 16 inches a year, and it got an inch the other day. Normally, we put water on in late March, but this year we’re having to do it now. 

We sell most of our fruit at farmers markets. We farm at high elevation, and we had frost damage last year. We lost some late season fruit, but we still did really good. We lost all the apricots because they bloom first and they’re a little more susceptible to frost than other varieties. But that just gave us more space on our tables to sell cherries. 

This will be the third year for our U-pick, which did really well last year. We don’t do that much from the U-pick orchard yet. It’s still expanding. Hopefully, it gets a little bit bigger. The neighbor brings over a big pen of chickens and little baby chicks. We don’t have pony rides like some of them do. 

People come from all around, and they love it. Some come all the way from Laguna Beach and San Diego. We keep the U-pick kind of small. We don’t mass advertise. We try to get high-end clientele for it. We get a lot of actors and high-income people to come. It’s fun for me, and I really like it. I like talking to the people that come out. Everybody’s so appreciative.