Sour Cherries

Our sour cherry tree only has a handful of small berries on it, but I went to a local orchard last week and picked 12 pounds of sour cherries. They said it wasn't a good year for sour cherries. Some trees had only a few, but I did find two that were loaded and easy picking.

With all the cherries, I made 1 cherry pie, 8 jelly jars of cherry-marmalade, and 3 quarts of cherries in light syrup.
The Cherry Marmalade recipe comes from the Ball Canning book, but I modified it for sour cherries. Here it is boiling away.
Cherry Marmalade
1 medium orange (including peel),seeded and finely chopped
1 quart pitted sour cherries
1/4 cup lemon juice
4 cups sugar
1 cinnamon stick

Cover chopped orange with water in a sauce pan, bring to a boil and cook about 20 minutes until soft. Add remaining ingredients, bring to a boil and cook about 35 minutes until it reaches the jelling point. Remove cinnamon stick. Pour into hot jars, leave 1/4 inch head space and process for 15 minutes in a boiling water bath. Makes about 4 half pints.

Harvest Monday 6/28/10

This week was a week of firsts harvests.

The first two broccoli (9.5 oz),
The first (and only) cherries (4 oz),
The first kale (1lb 2oz),
The first shelling peas (2.5 oz) and the first broccoli rabe (6.24 oz).The broccoli rabe is the back of the colander. Standard broccoli is in the front.
And then there was still more lettuce. We were traveling to visit my mom in Maryland. Her lettuce has gone bitter so she requested I bring some. I brought her over 12 oz of thinnings. Earlier in the week I harvested lettuce too so that brings the lettuce for the week to 1 lb.

Total this week: 3.5 pounds
Total this year: 9.4 pounds

You can see other gardeners' harvests at Daphne's Dandelions.

June Update: Fruit

In the yard we have a few fruit trees, vines, and bushes. I'm finding that not much fruit set, most likely because of a hard frost we had while the trees were in bloom in mid May.

We have a sour cherry tree on the side of the house. It only has a few green cherries on it this year. The sellers of the house left us a jar of jelly made from it last year so they must have had more fruit.

In the front of the house another tree, which I thought was ornamental. A few weeks ago I was weeding underneath and found a cherry on the ground. I looked up and have found a few other sweet cherries on the tree. I hope we can pick the handful of them when the ripen before the birds get to them.
We also have three apple trees. Apparently they were just planted last year. There are only about 5 apples on all three trees.
This spring I planted everbearing raspberries. They are just beginning to get their first blossoms. I probably should pluck them off and let the plants establish.
We found some blackberries in a pot at the back of the house. They are developing nicely. We've also seen a few places in the woods nearby where we should be able to pick blackberries.
For my birthday at the beginning of this month, I received 25 Honeoye strawberry plants. We won't let them fruit this year, but hope they will get well established.
There is one lone blueberry bush. It cross-pollinated with some in the field behind our house so we have a handful of green berries waiting to ripen.
On the front picket fence is a green grape vine. It is starting to set fruit. I'm not sure what we'll do with green grapes. Can you make green grape jelly?
This year's fruit will be measured in handfuls, but I hope it will be signs of bounty to come.

The End is in Sight!

Yesterday I finished digging the last of my 11 annual vegetable beds. My husband recently picked up the shovel to give me a hand at digging so that I could finally finish. I got the last of my pie pumpkins, melons, and zucchini in the ground. I also transplanted some annual flowers I started into amongst the vegetables. The only digging that remains is a 6' by 9' section at the back of the garden for perennial vegetables where we plan to put in asparagus and strawberries.

Now the most of green in the photo is growing because I planted it there and it will be producing food, not because it is full of weeds.

Other good garden news includes my shelling peas beginning to flower, potatoes taking off with their growth, little green tomatoes developing on my chelsea cherry tomatoes, lots of lettuce, and small apples and cherries developing on the trees. I'm lacking photos of these things because today we are blessed with some more rain. It's much needed after the dry month of May. Here is one photo I did manage to take of the green cherries on the tree.

Fruit Trees in Bloom

The sour cherry tree began blooming on May 1st.
Two Cortland apple trees started blooming on May 3rd.
I'm looking forward to the fruit they'll produce.

Tart Cherries

On Monday, my sister and I drove out to Hicks Orchard just across the border in NY state to pick tart Montmorency cherries. The cherry trees were grafted on semi-dwarf rootstock, but my sister and I are of semi-dwarf stock ourselves. There was wonderful fruit out of reach at the top of the trees, and a fair amount of good fruit within reach. We worked hard for an hour, stretching and reaching to pick ten and a half pounds of cherries. What surprised us was how many picked right off the stem. We drove from Hicks Orchard to Cherry Hill Farm to pick red currants. It only took us ten minutes to fill a couple of quarts.

Here are the fruits of our picking: red currants and Montmorency tart cherries.
The first thing I made with them was a cherry-currant jam. I got the recipe from Seasonal Ontario Food and I liked it because it uses the natural pectin in the currants rather than adding additional powdered pectin. The cooking down to the jelling point took longer for me, about 45 minutes, but it always seems to be slow on my stove. We ended up with (6) 1/2pint jars of cherry-currant jam.
While the jam was cooking down, I experimented with picked cherries from the NY Times. I have no idea how these will taste, but they sure look beautiful. It was quick and easy to make them, hopefully it will be worth it.
The final cherry preparation for the day was a fresh cherry pie. We used the recipe from the Joy of cooking, which only adds sugar, cornstarch, and a dash of almond flavoring. It is already half gone.
Today I had to decide what to do with the remaining cherries and currants. I decided that I have lots of jam already and that a cherry pie in the middle of winter would be a wonderful thing. So the remaining cherries were canned in a 30% sugar syrup. They measured 8 cups before they went in the pan, but when I ladled in to the jars, I only ended up with one quart jar and one 1/2 pint jar. So we will have one cherry pie sometime this winter, and some cherries on ice cream another time. The cherries look beautiful in the jar, though they all push towards the top.The remaining currants made one 1/2 pint jar of jelly which is very good. It is good enough that I'll probably be picking more currants soon to make more for Christmas gifts.