Cherry Pop, Wild Cherries and Rainier Fruit Company Sweet Organic Bing Cherries

Whether boy or girl, cherry pop tastes good to most children. However, in general, deep down South all carbonated sodas are called coke, not pop. Children are asked by parents and storekeepers alike "what kind of coke do you want?" And you respond, "the cherry one," if that is what you have a taste for that day. Cherry pop is sort of a special drink in the South, since wild cherries don't really grow down there. There's Cherry Laurel trees, which when you crumble the leaves in your hand amazingly smell just like sweet cherries, but no wild cherries of which to speak. But beyond today's (artificial) cherry pop is the real thing: the varieties of sweet cherries shipped in from up North. And I'd like to share with you a review of an excellent organic cherry from the (Mount) Rainier Fruit Company.

The (Mount) Rainier Fruit Company Sweet Organic Cherries are cultivated from around, you guessed it, Mount Rainier, Washington. There's the city of Tacoma, Washington a few miles to the northwest; there's Mt. Rainier National Park, which includes, of course, the active volcano that's called Mt. Rainier; there's the city of Selah, Washington, where Rainier Fruit Company is located, and the Yakima Valley a few miles southeast; and then there's cherry trees all around, all up and down the Cascade Mountain Range! And it is from this part of the world that, arguably, the very best cherries are to be had.

Though, you wouldn't catch the lil' lady and me arguing the point where the best cherries are grown. The particular variety we had were the most popular: Bing cherries. And as was mentioned earlier, the cherries were organically-grown. We seem to be having a great run on some of the best food we've ever tasted, since these cherries absolutely were the best cherries we'd ever eaten. Big, luscious, and perfectly sweet did they taste. So sweet were some of the cherries from the one pound container we bought, I would guess they were over the 20% fruit sugar mark that's considered the very high end of how much sugar a Bing cherry has. In fact, the sweetest of the lot had to be as sweet as the sweeter Rainier cherry variety, which is 20-25% fruit sugar. Here it is a full month or so after the fact and I'm still gushing over how perfect these Bing cherries were.

Bing cherries have the longest period of availability amongst all popular varieties of cherries: from about the first week in June through the second or third week of July. Still, that's a much shorter period of time compared to most every other fruit. As fast as cherries burst onto the market is as fast as they disappear until next year.

When they come around again next year, might I suggest you look for Rainier Fruit Company Sweet Organic Cherries. If you're a parent, put a pack of organic sweet cherries in the fridge for the kids rather than the artificial stuff that cherry pop is nowadays. And no matter where you live beyond the Pacific Northwest, remember to mark your calendar, now, to start looking in the month of June for delicious, high fiber, no sodium, naturally sweet and healthy for you cherries. Even if you happen to have wild cherries growing in your neck of the woods, they're not the wonderful cherries that come out of the Cascades, Mount Rainier and Yakima Valley region. But you may want to know, "is a cherry a berry or a fruit?" Click here to find the answer in the following article.