Friday, July 16, 2010

Three guesses

I'll give you three guesses what I'll be doing this weekend.

Here's a hint. The husband's uncle has a cherry orchard. I told you about how we pitted and processed his montmorency cherries last weekend. But he also grows tartarian cherries, which are large, dark red, and lip-smacking good sweet cherries.

Cherry picking 2010

His crop of tartarian cherries this year was really odd, probably due to our unusually cold winter and spring. Many of his trees didn't have cherries at all, and others had smaller cherries or cherries that were ripening at different times. The bottom line is that he decided it wasn't worth it to try to harvest them to sell.

That is music to my ears. Because if it isn't worth selling them, it isn't worth picking them, and then scavengers like me are allowed to go raid the trees. :)

So the husband and I went over there the other night and found about three trees that were just loaded with cherries.

Cherry picking 2010

We probably picked close to 80 pounds of cherries, and I spent yesterday sorting them and washing them by hand. That's much harder to do without a giant water bath and conveyor belt!

Now I'm faced with the unenviable task of pitting all those suckers, one at a time, by hand...

Cherry picking 2010

Oh, yeah. I also have to do something with all those apricots you see in the background!

5 comments:

  1. What a nice problem to have! I love cherries, but then, who doesn't? mmmm, and apricot jam too. I'm off to share your picking weekend with Twitter - so interesting.

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  2. Oh man, that looks delicious. May I come over?

    I saw this "high volume" cherry pitter when I bought mine, and figured I wouldn't ever need something so hardcore, but obviously you could make use of one!

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  3. Oh, how I could use a high volume cherry pitter right about now! :)

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