A Cherry Picking Adventure
For the first time in a few years, my spouse and I were successful in collecting enough berries to make several jars of jam *dances for joy*. However, there is a back story to this whole escapade. For your information, dear reader, this story is about homesteading and jam making…there will be no recipe at the end. I’m sorry to disappoint, but I’m not that kind of blogger. On to the story.
Normally, the low hanging fruit of our cherry plum tree (or so we thought! I’ll get to that in a moment…) is picked off by the local wildlife, such as deer and wild birds, so there’s typically not much for us humans to have and enjoy. This year though, there was SO MUCH fruit and we were delighted. We made sure to leave the upper part of the tree alone so the birds could still get their seasonal food source.
Remember how I said that we thought this was a cherry plum tree this whole time? We soon discovered it is a Rainier Cherry tree. We had no idea, even though we’ve lived on this homestead for a few years. Rainier cherries are known for their sweeter taste compared to traditional red cherries. I personally love the natural beauty of the Rainier cherry trees, so my appreciation for these trees have only grown. Now we’re excited to pick cherries each summer, along with figs, grapes, and blackberries. It was fun pulling out large bowls, boxes, whatever we could find, to pick what we could reach. It was a lot of rewarding work as we finished picking the cherries into the dusk of the evening. My spouse got increasingly excited about making cherry jam as the night went on.
Cherries, freshly picked, wait to become delicious fruit preserves.
The next step to start this process was to remove the cherry pits. Well, dear reader, we didn’t own a cherry pitter at the time, a tool used to remove the hard seed in the center of the fruit. As I’m writing this, I’m realizing I could have used a metal straw to remove the pits, and that would have saved me 3 hours of my life driving around our small community looking for a cherry pitter. But what’s the fun of that?! Now we have a cherry pitter to add to our collection of useful tools in the kitchen. On to the jam making!
Dear reader, remember when I mentioned that I will not provide a jam recipe in this blog post? That is still true, I am not doing that. But I will provide pictures. It’s the very least I can do. Once the cherries were ready, this is where my spouse stepped in. They sanitized the mason jars, lids, then blended and cooked the cherries and added the pectin. Then BAM. JAM.
Sugar, just added to the cooked fruit, waits to be stirred in.
Newly canned cherry jam jars sit cooling on a kitchen counter.
Final disclaimer:
Dear reader, please be patient with me, for I am but a humble newbie to proper homesteading. I make mistakes all the time and figure it out along the way. It’s part of the fun! Happy ‘steading!
