Chary, not cheery about cherries

How ‘bout that? Three sort-of-rhyming words describe my task of today and yesterday. The word chary means “cautiously or suspiciously reluctant to do something.”

Luke brought us a whole bunch of cherries he picked the day before yesterday. Like gallons of cherries! They are ripe and needed to be handled now. After suffering a thumbnail pain that resulted from doing it all wrong in yesterday’s pitting session, I got back into the job reluctantly today.

This is a wet, messy job that leaves my hands bathed in bright red, bloody looking juice.

Correctly pitting would be fitting. Use a tool, silly fool. Now I'm using a paring knife to circum-cut the cherry, twisting the two halves apart, using the knife to pop out the pit, then dumping the fruit into a cup. When the cup fills, I dump it into a small vacuum-sealable bag, pump the air out, then toss the bags into the freezer to give us time to figure out what to do from there. One possibility is to use the blender and juice them. Another is to dry the fruit in our electric fruit dryer. Right now, Hilary is using the dryer on her stash of cherries.

Bags and bags of ripe cherries!

Luke was buying grass hay from one of our ranch guests, a man who raises sheep, hay, and cherries at his ranch near Clovis. He was given access to at least two acres (0.8 hectare) of trees that were producing double fruit, not acceptable to the commercial market.

Karla took a bunch of them in to her physical therapy session in Oakhurst and got enough smiles to last a whole month from staff and classmates.
 
I have another several hours of pitting to look forward to. I would much rather keep writing my blog but hey, the reward (delicious ripe cherries!) is calling me away.