Keeping it in the family: Fruit stand still yielding

Published 10:29 pm Sunday, August 23, 2009

BAKER FLATS — This is the season of abundance for local fruit stands. Fresh fruit and vegetables of all kinds are tumbling out of the valley’s cornucopia of orchards and farms right now and into dozens of roadside stands that attract travelers like fruit flies to a ripe peach.

“This is our big season. We’re at our peak right now,” said Brenda Reeves, co-owner of the family-operated B&B Fruit Stand on Highway 2/97, about 2.5 miles north of the Odabashian Bridge. The fruit stand specializes in cherries, apricots, peaches, nectarines and plums, all picked from the 20-acre orchard the family owns behind the fruit stand.

Started in 1962 by Brenda’s parents, Edsel and Evelyn Reeves, B&B is one of the oldest fruit stands in Chelan and Douglas counties, Brenda said. The only one that’s been in operation longer, is Feil’s Fruit Stand, a short way farther north on Highway 2/97, which has been around since the 1920s. That stand also sells soft fruit from the family orchard, but specializes in heirloom apple varieties.

Reeves said this is the first year the family has run B&B without the help of her parents. Edsel Reeves died in January 2008. Evelyn died this April. Both were 81.

“Mom and Dad built this business. We’re just trying to do what they did and provide the best quality and the freshest fruit possible,” said Brenda, who retired from her career in dental hygiene to run the business full time with her brother and sister-in-law, Braden and Kathy Reeves, and their younger sister Kim Linderman. Another brother, Dan, died in 2005.

“We all work together pretty well,” said Linderman, a Cashmere schoolteacher nine months of the year. “Our parents left this legacy for us. I definitely feel they’re still here helping.”

Linderman said her father would start work in the orchard at 5 a.m. and still be at the fruit stand with his wife every day during the busy summer months.

“It was their life. They didn’t want to do anything else. We’re not that committed, but there’s more of us to spread the work around,” she said.

Her parents forged relationships with customers that have lasted decades, she added.

The fruit stand opens each year in early June. The Reeveses buy cherries from the state’s earliest ripening orchards in Mattawa to get started. Their own cherries are usually ripe enough to pick by June 15.

Apricots are their biggest crop. Only a small number are sold at the fruit stand, though. Most go to a Seattle distributor that sells them all over the country.

The orchard has six varieties of peaches. Red Haven gets picked first. Red Globe are ripe now, along with Red Gold nectarines.

A picking crew goes out each morning to pick some of each for fruit stand sales as well as large wholesale customers in North Dakota and Alaska, said Brenda Reeves.

Donut peaches, J.H. Hale, Elberta and O’Henry varieties extend the peach season until September.

The family also grows several plum varieties. They buy pears and apples, cantaloupe, watermelon, berries, tomatoes, onions and potatoes from other local producers to sell at the stand until early November.

The stand offers a variety of local jams, jellies, honey, cider and candy, too.

“We don’t have a lot of other stuff like some fruit stands,” Reeves said.

“Dad would always say, ‘We can be a fruit stand or we can be a knickknack place.’ We want to be a fruit stand.”