As the weather gets chillier in Placer County, mandarin growers expect bountiful harvests. The crop is ready for picking just in time for this weekend’s Mountain Mandarin Festival.

Owari Satsuma Mandarin, a seedless, easy-to-peel, Japanese hybrid and the most popular variety in the Placer County foothills, gets its most intense, sweet flavor thanks to the cold nights of the fall and winter seasons.

Gary Gilligan, director of the Mountain Mandarin Festival, said mandarin trees usually have heavy yields every other year.

“This year is a large crop of mandarins,” Gilligan said. “(During large-crop years) a mature tree can produce up to 300 pounds of fruits.”

Grower Tom Aguilar agrees this year’s crop is larger than last year’s.

“The weather has been really good, so flavor should be good. Everyone I’ve been talking to says we’re going to have a heavy crop,” Aguilar said.

The Aguilar family has farmed their Penryn property since the 1940s. Initially, Frank and Bernice Aguilar grew pears, peaches and plums. But in the 1950s, disease wiped out many of the pear trees.

That’s when Frank Aguilar turned to citrus.

By the late 1950s, Aguilar had mandarins in full production. It proved to be an ideal crop that continues to flourish.

In the late 1990s, son Tom Aguilar retired from his job with Reynolds Aluminum in Rocklin and now leads the farm.

“It’s definitely home,” he said.

In addition to mandarins, the Aguilar orchards produce Valencia oranges

“We sell everything pretty much locally and also to the Raley’s (supermarket) chain,” Tom Aguilar said.

“We usually go from the first week of November through the end of the year,” Aguilar said.

The owners of Newcastle Mandarin Ranch, which harvests about 800 mandarin trees, are hoping for 80,000 to 100,000 pounds of fruit this year.

“It’s only a seven-week harvest,” Duane Lewis said. “It’s a lot of work for those two months because it all comes at one time.”

Lewis said the early rains and cold nights bring out the color and sugar content of the fruit.

“The colder the nights, the better for the fruit for ripening,” he said.

Lynn Lewis said fruit is picked the weekend before the festival.

“We like to keep the mandarins on the trees as long as possible because the longer they’re on the trees, the sweeter they get,” Duane Lewis said.

“I’ve got everything prepared (for the festival),” Duane Lewis said.

Because this is a large-crop year, Gilligan said growers would probably be still picking fruit in January. Last year, which was a small-crop year, a mature tree produced about 50 pounds of fruits, and growers were generally out by December.

Gilligan said some of the big growers usually sell 2,000 or 3,000 thousand bags of mandarins during the festival.

“This year, the crop is coming in about the week before the festival. There should be plenty of fruits available.”