July 18, 2001
Visitors sweet on orchard tours
By Carol South
Herald contributing writer
It's a feeling you never forget, even after 60 pass.
Getting out of the tour wagon next to Amon Orchard's sweet cherry trees, members of the tour eagerly accepted the invitation to sample some cherries, both dark and light sweets. For Dorothy Labor King of Southfield, plucking some cherries off a tree brought back a flood of memories.
"I haven't picked a cherry since I was 18 and growing up in the Thumb area," she said enthusiastically. "We always hand picked using ladders that were two different heights. In those days we canned and with nine children we had jars and jars of everything."
The Amon Orchard tour filled her in on modern harvesting methods, however, King could vividly recall picking cherries on her relatives' farms near the Sandusky area. She also remembers another facet of life from those days.
"My mother and grandmother would pit the cherries by hand, using their hairpins," said King, who was visiting the area with her husband, daughter and son-in-law. "These were not bobby pins but long steel hair pins women used in those days. Not the wooden or bone ones, the steel ones got the pit out in one move."
The Amon Orchard tours are an annual feature of the National Cherry Festival, giving festival attendees a chance to see a farm in action. The tour winds through the orchard and discusses history of cherry farming, changing farming and harvesting methods, different type of cherries and how they are processed and marketed.
With this year's cherry picking coinciding with the festival, it was an extremely busy time for the Amon family and their employees. They ran tours every half hour all day on each of the Festival's eight days, running up to 350 people through per day.
However, seeing eyes light up as they spied all the fresh cherries, trees heavy with fruit and tasted all the cherry products remains a delight, said owner Judy Amon.
"It amazes me how people respond to this," she said, noting that this year they had tourists from South Africa and Mexico who were fascinated by the production process. "Even yesterday we had a couple here who said they had a dream to take this tour."
"You feel guilty because it is not that big of a deal to you, we live here all the time."
Amon Orchards offers tours year round but their highest-traffic times are the Cherry Festival and their Fall Harvest weekends. She believes that the popularity of visiting a farm is related to our high-tech culture and that so many people are a few generations removed from farm life.
"We've found that the higher tech our society gets, the more people sort of have to get back to basics and nature," Amon said. "Years back you either grew up on a farm or had a relative who grew up on a farm. Nowadays it is just the opposite, so people bring out their kids so they can just find out how it works."
The Riffenburgh family of Pasadena came to Amon Orchards on Friday afternoon as part of their National Cherry Festival vacation. Staying with friends in the region, this was their first trip to an orchard on their first trip to Michigan. After the tour, Steve Riffenburgh could take home some facts about cherry farming to add to his love of the fruit.
"I learned about the different varieties, underwater irrigation, marketing and why this is a good area to grow them," he said. "I love cherries and they do grow in California but they are not nearly as sweet. These are fabulous."