Cherries

Our friends Jeff and Deena Rosswurm called last week and said their cherry tree was ready to be picked. They have this huge sweet cherry tree and it bears incredible amounts of fruit [1].

We were busy getting caught up on farming work, getting nitrogen on the corn before it got too big, getting herbicides on the weeds before they got too big. But we wrapped that up on Saturday and nephew Tom and I headed up to Green Township [2] to pick cherries at the Rosswurm’s.

It was amazing. The tree wasn’t perhaps as heavily laden as in years past, but it was still loaded with the most incredibly juicy sweet cherries that you can imagine. Tom and I picked about 15 pounds in 30 minutes.

Tom and I were going to get together and pit and dry some of them today, but he called me this morning and said some friends had come over last night and they’d eaten all of his.

Fortunately, I don’t have any friends [3], so I still had all my cherries. Today I pitted them and froze most of them. I saved about a pound to eat fresh, and [Spoiler alert: Mom, if you’re reading, stop now!] a pound to give to my mom and dad. I still had 4 pounds to freeze.

And I had a nice bunch left over, not enough to freeze, to have for breakfast tomorrow on my yogurt.

You can see the cherry juice splattered all over the bowl. That’s pretty much what the kitchen and I looked like after I pitted the cherries. It looked like a creature had met a very bloody end.

After last year’s drought, it’s so fine to be enjoying juicy and bountiful fruit.

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1. That’s how everything grows in what Debbie calls “Jeff Land.” Lush, verdant, and bountiful. It’s a marvel.

2. God’s Country. Or Hillbilly Heaven. Depending on your point of view.

3. Except the aforementioned Rosswurm’s, and of course they’d hardly come down and eat my cherries when they have the tree in their yard.