Cheery Cherry

We have a cherry tree. This is not it. I think I hear an echo from yesterday. This is a commercial cherry orchard. These trees are sprayed and cared for. As you can see, they are loaded with fruit.



We have a very old tree that would have been ripped out and replaced in a real orchard years ago. Some years it has no cherries at all, most years, just a few for the birds. This year there were lots of cherries, and the birds left me just enough. It's definitely "organic" fruit- no chemicals except drifting exhaust from the road, or bird poop from the sky.



Trust me, you appreciate food much more when you have touched every piece of fruit multiple times. Of course, cherries have a pit, and those have to be removed. For this few cherries, just doing them by hand isn't too bad.

But I remember the pitter that we had when I was a child. It was a big black cast iron thing that clamped on the counter. It had two flat plates about 5 inches in diameter with a spiral imprint on the inner sides, and a hopper. You fed in the cherries and turned a crank. The plates whirled, the cherries were flattened and the pits dropped out the bottom.

Of course, the drawback was that you had to sort the cherries well before feeding them in. When you pit cherries by hand the ones with the worms can be examined individually. Sometimes half the cherry can be salvaged. But you don't want to mash those up in the pitter, so we sorted first, and did the less than perfect cherries by hand. The really good ones went through the pitter.

The benefit was speed, the drawback was that the nice round individuality of the cherries was lost.

This year, there weren't too many worms. On the right is the pitted fruit, and the bucket on the left is the waste. Not bad.



What am I going to do with them? No question at all for me. My highest cherry priority is...



... pie

See Rhubarb