Next week — if Mother Nature cooperates — a website for the latest Dell’Osso Farms’ venture is expected to go live.

It will be for Cherries on the Farm, a u-pick 15-acre orchard with more than 1,000 trees.

And if it proves successful Ron and Susan Dell’Osso plan to plant even more acres of cherries and possibly other fruit trees such as apples and open the farm for a spring cherry festival complete with other attractions.

Issues such as a rain in the coming weeks and such could side track their plans, but as it stands now, they are planning for opening their orchards to people who pay to pick fresh cherries sometime in mid-May.

“We’re not too sure how big the demand will be,” Susan Dell’Osso said. “All of the cherries could be gone in two days or it could take 10 days.”

The trees were planted more than three years ago and trained in a manner to produce more cherries on limbs closer to the ground. Pickers will also be able to procure ladders to pick as well from higher branches.

There are four varieties of cherry trees including Bing, Tulare and the popular sweet coral cherries.

They will also have baked goods from their Country Store bakery available for purchase in a tent at the  orchard’s edge. 

Cherry items such as pies, cobbler, and doughnuts will top the offerings along with other baked goods.

A spring festival fits into the vision the family has for the 1,000 acres nudged against Interstate 5, the San Joaquin River and Paradise Cut.

It would be the third major annual event if it comes about. The others are the month-long Dell’Osso Farm event that celebrates pumpkins throughout the month of October and attracts upwards of 180,000 visitors a year as well as the Holidays on the Farm December event that includes  sliding downhill artificial snow and an ice rink among other attractions.

Should a cherry festival materialize, it wouldn’t likely happen for another three to four years. That’s the time it would take additional acreage of fruit trees to produce fruit.

California along with Oregon and Washington represent the largest cherry producing  states in the nation.

San Joaquin County has a sizeable cherry crop with orchards clustered primarily around Linden that has its own cherry festival.

The u-pick cherries are the only such orchard along Interstate 5 from the base of the Tehachapi Mountains to Redding.

To contact Dennis Wyatt, email dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com