Central Victoria is forecast to receive up to 50 millimetres of rain on Thursday. Colin and Suzanne Pickering are facing a disaster if the forecast wet weather hits. Their premium cherries at their Harcourt North orchard, due to ripen in the next few days, are vulnerable to wet weather. If heavy rain hits overnight on Thursday it could cause the cherries skin to swell and split, and ruin over half of their crop. Once the cherry is split, there’s almost nothing you can do with it, Mrs Pickering said. They’re so worthless she just throws them on the ground when picking. The premium black star cherries are one of the 12 varieties the orchard grows which ripen progressively from mid-November to January. The Pickerings were fortunate to come out of Sunday’s rain with most of their previous crops intact. Mrs Pickering attributes this lucky escape to the fact that the cherries were not quite ripe, meaning the cherries did not swell beyond the capacity of their skins. Humid dry condition which could follow storms also makes cherries vulnerable to brown rot. Mrs Pickering said she hopes the Bureau of Meteorology’s forecasts are mistaken, but that after 20 years of cherry farming she knows there’s no point worrying: “At the end of the day, there’s nothing you can do about it. I’m just really hoping that they’ve got it wrong.” Source - https://www.freshplaza.com