Picking Rubies!!!
So what's dark red, round, short growing season, can make one feel ill, if indulged in too much, but absolutely heavenly in taste? The CHERRY!
Once a year, some good friends of ours, call us up and ask us to come help pick their cherry trees. They can't use them all, and so they call us and we trade gold (butter) for rubies and everyone is happy.
This past summer was no exception and we had a perfect day for cherry picking. We waited for Grandma to arrive so I would have an extra pair of efficient picking hands, and we set off.
Almost to our destination we come around a corner where a little pond nestles, and we saw this lovely sight.
Arriving at our destination, oooohh, what a glorious sight met our eyes! Cherries, cherries and more cherries!!!
Big luscious black and red cherries!
Everyone grabbed buckets and boxes as fast as they could and headed for the trees.
Of course the first order of business is always to run a taste test and see if they really are as good as they look, while trying not to appear guilty of having eaten the first cherry.
While others resemble a chipmunk in their quest for acquiring cherries.
And still others, being to short to climb trees and not allowed on the ladders, after giving their mother a heart attack, are perfectly happy to act as gleaners cleaning what others have dropped. I don't think his bucket ever had anymore cherries in it, as is attested to by his face.
We also had a ground crew, consisting of owner Yevette, PW and JW2. They were responsible for getting a start on processing the cherries by de-stemming them so we didn't to do them all when we get home.
And while we do have pictures of grandma helping us pick, I didn't get a really good one, and I figured she would come after me if I posted them online!
Many hands make light work, and we were done in a couple of hours. Coming back we had boxes . . .
And boxes . . .
Of cherries.
And then of course the REAL work began!
Washing 100 plus pounds of cherries!
Then packaging for freezing and we also can as many quarts as we can also. At this point I think we canned roughly 70 quarts of cherries.
They are such a marvelous treat now, on a cold winter night!