Thursday, 25 June, 2009
Fruitful
Dick Nagy called to see if I wanted to come and pick sour cherries at his orchard. I love the fruit for preserves, but it is rare to find any at the supermarkets. Sometimes called pie cherries, they're also good for fruit pies or tarts. Dick has two lovely trees, one planted by his uncle, and the other is one he planted. Guess I'm one of the few people who wants the fruit, so he just calls and lets me do the harvesting.
Aren't they beautiful. Problem is, with all the rain we've had,
gray days and cool temperatures, the flavor is not as intense
as in some years. I picked two buckets, that's about 14 pounds.
I'll make a sour cherry mustard relish, with thyme and some
guardjillo smoked dry chili pepper, and Grey Poupon mustard, and
also some sour cherry and blackberry jam (pureed berries, last year's,
from the freezer. Pureed, because the little seeds get stuck in my teeth.)
With my handy dandy Oxo cherry pitter it takes about an hour
to pit one bucket, which ends up as about 3 quarts of pitted cherries.
I scavanged a bucket's worth of green apples that Dick had thinned off the trees.
He removes some of the fruit so the apples left on the tree grow to a better size.
I scavange them to make a pectin-rich puree to use with low pectin fruits.
I also bought a couple of quarts of sweet cherries that Dick had picked.
With all the rain some of the cherries had cracked, but their flavor was good.
We walked around, and Dick showed me his blueberry cage. Very clever design:
metal pipe buried in the ground, then black PVC pipe bent into supporting hoops
and fitted to the in-ground pipes. Bird netting draped over, tied in two places to
each hoop, and fastened closed at each end. That should keep the birds out!
Did you know that the cultivation of blueberries was developed right here in New Jersey?
It was Miss Elizabeth White, of White's Bog in the Pine Barrens, in the 1920s, looking for
another crop at a different time of year that the autumn cranberry harvest. Back then, pH and
cross-pollination were not taken into consideration, if, indeed, those factors were even known.
The black raspberries will soon be ready too, my favorite soft fruit.