A tale of two cherries

 

A porcupine, having a nap in the cherry tree

Note: I wrote this blog entry a year ago, but never got it posted. And here we are, nearly to cherry season again, but after an unexpected freeze while they were blooming, we don't yet know if there will be much of a crop this year. 

Sakes alive, I fear we’ve been cursed to live in interesting times, as the saying has it … but this is the tale of the smallholding of Foggy Mountain Farm, and not the tale of the Coming of the Great Plague, or all the disasters it presaged, and so, to our story.

Which is about cherries. We are blessed with a number of feral cherry trees on the property, great, venerable things 50 and 60 feet tall, and, we discovered this year, at least two kinds of them. This year they bore a bumper crop, to the great joy of the robins, squirrels, porcupines, and doubtless many other beings.

Including me. I am either a squirrel or a dragon at heart – a harvest dragon, to be specific – and the sight of all that gorgeous, glistening fruit awoke every instinct I possess to … gather it all into my lair and hover over it, hissing in admiration. Or something like that.

In any event, we picked cherries. Pounds of them.

I kept promising I was done now, but then a week later I’d see those branches still hung with fruit glowing like lanterns in the sun, and announce that, actually, I was not done, because it was just Wrong, to squander a chance to preserve all that goodness. What if there are no cherries next year?!

One of the problems brought about by the Great Plague to plague dragons hoarders preservers, has been disruptions in the supply chain, including the supply of canning jar lids, which have been nigh unto impossible to get hold of for the past year. Not to be thwarted, however, I besought me a supply of the things late last winter, from an E-bay merchant who marked them up to an appalling degree.

I handed over my gold nonetheless, lest the long-promised arrival in the stores never materialize, and was glad that I had done so, when indeed it did not.

As mentioned, we have two kinds of cherries: Bright red pie cherries and tiny, dark sweet cherries that are about half pit. Both are stunningly beautiful. We could not reach them all, given the height of the trees, and so there were plenty left for the birds and for the squirrels, who leave little mounds of cracked cherry pits all over the woods. This may have something to do with the surprising number of cherry trees occupying our mixed oak and Doug fir wood.

Having taken note, I’ve decided that what we need is more cherry trees, and so I took to tossing handfuls of the pits along the hedgerows. With luck, we’ll end with an entire forest row of cherries — some of which I’ll prune, so we can stay off ladders in our rapidly-encroaching old age. At least, for harvesting purposes.

We have no orchard ladder, so like any self-respecting pair of lunatics foragers, we carried a regular ladder through the woods into the far field where the cherries dwell, balanced it as best we could among the blackberry vines covering the uneven earth, and clambered up with our baskets, hoping the adventure wouldn’t end with broken bones, and picked bowls full of glowing red pie cherries.

On the way back home with our loot one day, we saw a baby western tanager sitting motionless on the forest floor under a bush, while its father chirped and fluttered in the branches above, doing his best to distract us. Another day, we watched a Steller’s Jay tuck an acorn into a hollow in a fir branch, to hold the nut securely while the bird hammered at it with its bill. Sadly, we had no camera with us either time. We did, however, get a picture of the porcupine we saw one morning, sleeping the top of the biggest cherry tree. 

We gave pie cherries away, we froze them, canned them, dried them, baked a pie, made a small batch of jam. We admired the porcupine we found occupying a high branch of the biggest cherry tree, and we left the seeds out for the mice and squirrels (they thanked me by storing them in — already occupied — pots all over my greenhouse. It is possible I’m going to have a bumper crop of baby cherry trees at some point).

We then began turning more and more of our attention to the little black cherries, which glow, on the tree, and in bowls, like marbles or cranberries or jewels. They also taste divine — and for the first few pickings, we could reach them from the ground.

The pie cherries were relatively easy to pit; we possess a device that pits six at a time, although you have to double check its work. But the little black cherries are too small for it; they must be tediously and repetitively pitted by hand, which gets hard on the wrists after a while. But it’s worth it.

Oh, so worth it.

They were astonishingly delicious when dried, so we picked and dried some more. And then I made a batch of fruit cheese, little dark squares of exquisite, tangy sweet fruit candy.

And then, with the very last picking, a batch of jam.

And then I gathered all those glowing jars of goodness into the center of my lair, and coiled around them, and if you need me, I’ll be here, counting them.

Although, the blackberries are ripe and our dear friend up the road tells me she has yellow plums begging to be picked …