20 Pounds

...of cherries!

Last week I heard about a U-Pick cherry place about 20 minutes away. So I talked with some friends, and Wednesday we drove out past Troy to Nelson's Orchard. The last time I went to a cherry picking place was probably 12 years ago. I always secretly competed with how many pounds of cherries my sister could pick. She might have read more books than I did, but by golly, I picked more cherries than she did.

They had loads of Bing cherries, and it didn't take long to fill my two big buckets. Chloë enjoyed crawling around in the dirt and eating cherries that I pit for her. I brought home just over 20 pounds, and managed to get most of them taken care of yesterday. My dear friend Abby lent me her spring action cherry pitter. I had done a few by means of the paper clip method, but boy, that it one tedious way to pit cherries. The fancy contraption is sooo much faster. Hurray for great inventions.

That's what 20 pounds of cherries looks like. And 36 half-pint jars, and 10 pounds of sugar.


There was cherry juice splattered everywhere by the time I was done pitting.


It even got all over my walls.

I had a lot of cherry pits. Too bad there isn't some great use for them.

My kitchen, mid-madness. I finally bought a canner last week, so now I get to be all domestic.

Two gallon bags, pitted and frozen, 13 half-pint jars and 2 pint jars of low sugar jam, 4 pint jars of pitted canned cherries, and a big tuperware for the fridge. I would have made more jam, but that's all the pectin I had, and our local grocery store has been out of the good low sugar kind for two weeks now!