The Flathead Cherry: Sweet Fruit at the Edge of the Mountains

The eastern shore of Flathead Lake supports one of the most unlikely agricultural industries in Montana: commercial cherry orchards. The combination of long summer days, abundant sunshine, cool nights, and the thermal buffering effect of the lake's enormous water mass creates microclimatic conditions almost uniquely suited to sweet cherries. Commercial orchards took hold here over a century ago.

Cherries were shipped out of the valley by rail, and the harvest grew into a real industry. Today roadside stands along the eastern lakeshore sell fresh cherries in July and August, a tradition that predates the interstate highway by decades.

Margaret Estey planted an experimental sweet cherry orchard on the east shore in eighteen ninety-three, and a tree takes about five years to bear. In the nineteen twenties the Robbin brothers of Kalispell planted seven hundred trees near Yellow Bay, and in nineteen thirty-five growers organized the cooperative now called Flathead Lake Cherry Growers. Nights stay between forty and fifty degrees, which suits the fruit. Picking runs from late July into August, from daylight until about one in the afternoon or until the heat reaches eighty degrees. A mature tree can give more than one hundred pounds, and the area has produced as much as seven million pounds in a season. A severe frost in the late nineteen eighties killed groves and forced replanting.