Bare Mtn Farm

Quotable Sunday 07/08/2012

Life (Really!) is a Bowl of Cherries!

About twenty years ago, we planted a tart pie cherry tree here our home.  We have always been big on veggie gardening and putting food away via canning and freezing.  This was to be a dwarf tree so picking would be easy.  Well you have to wait years for the tree to really produce.  Time passes and the tree gets bigger, and bigger and bigger yet but not many cherries.  It is tricky to get cherries here in Oregon, when the rains ruin pollination.  We got a few pounds off the tree in the past but not recently.  For many years the birds got them all and one year we found a mother raccoon and her babies stripping the tree clean and breaking lots of branches.  But this week, we spied something red in the trees.  OH, yea there are cherrries!!!  So instead of mowing or planting flowers or anything else, we had to get those cherries. It turns into a two person job.

The problem with this effort, the cherries are about 15-20 feet in the air and we don't have a fruit ladder.  The tree is planted on a slope and the guy on the ladder is wobbling so a few quick photos and back to hanging on to the ladder.  No broken necks here.

This is the low hanging fruit so far but the cherries are most abundant at the top.  So maybe if we could hook a branch and pull it down a bit, we could pick some more cherries.

A tool is fashioned and it seems to work pretty well, so higher he climbs while I hang on to the ladder and pull down the branches with the new tool.

  

Hey we have a full bowl of cherries.  Took awhile, probably should have been planting flowers.  But oooh, ahhh, such beauties. over ten pounds of these beauties!

                We decided to make sour cherry jam and freeze some cherries for later.

Ta daaa..... The bounty of nature's wonderfulness.  The jam tastes like cherry pie, I added a little almond extract and cinnamon to the cherries.  

Tony is saving some of the pits. He thinks he can grow more cherry trees.  Not sure about that but what the heck if you don't try, how will you know if you can or not.

We always squirrel away our freshly canned products for a fall or winter day, when they will taste like a summer afternoon.  But I love how there is always a smidge left, not worth rolling the canner again.  These are the little jars we enjoy now and know that is was SO worth it to climb that tree for some cherries.

"Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life.   It turns what we have into enough, and more.  It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity.  It can turn a meal into a feast,
a house into a home, a stranger into a friend.  Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow."
-  Melody Beattie