The plan was to get up early Saturday morning and drive out to the U-pick farm but walking out of the house Saturday morning, I was greeted with dark clouds and thunder. The picking was pushed back to Sunday morning which t was beautiful: sunny, cool and breezy. Perfect for picking. Once Alice and I got to the farm, we quickly realized the cherries we really wanted, the ripe ones, were at the top of the trees and we were without a ladder. Alice came up with the idea of the "Grabby Stick" which was a broken branch with a smaller forking branch that could be used to reach up and grab the loaded branches and pull them down into reach. That Alice... she's one clever cookie! We spent over an hour picking when it occurred to me that we would be paying $3/lb. for our u-pick cherries and a local grocery chain were selling Bing cherries for $1.77/lb. We decided to compromise: 1/2 locally picked and 1/2 cherries from somewhere else. I picked 6 lbs. of cherries at the local farm and bought a little over 7 lbs. of cherries at the store. Then I mixed the two when I sliced and pitted. (Sadly, the sour cherry season was earlier than I expected and I missed the season. I was looking forward to canned sour cherries this winter.)
It took me almost two entire Pirates of the Carribbean movies to slice and pit over 13 lbs. of cherries. Once again, I used my handy dandy cherry pitter: an unfolded paperclip. Worked like a charm, although, once again, I have a very stained right index finger and thumb where the cherry juice reacted with the metal in the paperclip and dyed my fingers purple. I find it easiest to spread a layer of sliced cherries out on a cookie sheet and freeze them before shoveling them into freezer containers. Doing it that way means I'll be able to pour out individual pieces instead of bricks of frozen, stuck-together cherries. I've already got 8 1/2 quarts in the freezer and I've got probably 2 more that still need to be frozen on the cookie sheet first.
I'm full of the Happy right now. Blueberries are next!
Yum! Cherries can be $6.99/lb here, even in season!
Posted by: elizabeth | July 14, 2009 at 08:29 PM