BEST OF BRITISH Cherries
In our ongoing series highlighting delicious produce around the country, we meet the artisans and farmers helping to bring it to our table. This month:
It’s a happy day in Great Horwood when Vikki Grainge wheels her cherry cart onto the village green.
Parishioners have been waiting eagerly for the midsummer reappearance of this mobile honesty shop, which heralds the beginning of the six-week Horwood cherry season. The upcycled vintage cart is loaded with punnets of shiny magenta fruits that owe their intense flavour and chin-soaking juiciness to the fact that Vikki got up at 4am to pick them in their prime. “The sooner you eat them, the better they taste,” she says.
So intoxicating is the first bite of such a cherry that it was the reason Vikki and her husband, David, started Horwood Cherries. They planted their orchard eight years ago in a corner of Eastfield Farm in North Buckinghamshire. Despite occupying less than two and a half acres of David’s 200-acre beef enterprise just outside Great Horwood, the 2,500 cherry trees that Vikki spends all year nurturing yield more than five tonnes of plump and pristine fruits during their short but glorious season.
“I get an adrenaline rush when it starts,” says Vikki, who spends an intense six weeks from the first harvest in mid-June eating, sleeping and breathing cherries. Once she’s risen at dawn to harvest ripe cherries, she makes deliveries to farm shops and restaurants and fills up the cart. Then it’s back to the farm to welcome the pick-your-own visitors.
LOVE AT FIRST BITE
When Vikki and David decided to plant a cherry orchard, it was very much a business arrangement. Vikki had recently returned from teaching PE in the Middle East and they’d only just started going out. Over a drink, David told her about a farmer friend who’d returned from Kent with a punnet of fresh cherries. “I hadn’t realised that UK-grown cherries could taste so good,” says David, whose enthusiasm led to the pair forming a 50:50 partnership. “We drew it all up properly in case the romantic relationship didn’t last,” Vikki explains. “It was one of those ideas that just spiralled.”
David had grown soft fruit before, having set up a pick-your-own strawberry enterprise in his twenties. Vikki, meanwhile, knew nothing about fruit cultivation, but they agreed that tending the trees and selling the cherries would be her responsibility – David was busy building up a suckler beef herd with his father. “I like to challenge myself,” Vikki says, with understatement: her last challenge was riding across 1,000km of Mongolian grassland to complete the world’s toughest endurance horse race.
Inspired by stories about the cherry-growing heritage of her adopted cou
