Frank makes a delicious cherry pie, as you know.
But we have struggled with the difficulty in finding cherries for said pie.
We usually buy canned cherries, which are not always available at the store and when they are, they are very expensive. We often pay $5 per can...and we use 3 cans of cherries per pie. We have even resorted to buying them from Amazon by the case. So, yeah, we are crazy.
One day I was complaining about the problem finding sour cherries and my neighbor piped up that her family actually owned a pie cherry orchard and that when it was time for harvest she would see if I could get some. I was ecstatic! And then I forgot all about it.
The other day she says to me that it is harvest time and asked if I would like to come see how they harvest the cherries and maybe pick some.
Frank and I jumped at the chance to check it out!
The orchard was HUGE. So many trees!
They use these big machines/tractors/conveyor belts to shake the trees and knock all the cherries down and into these huge bins. It's amazing that the shaking doesn't damage the trees, honestly.
Here is a really bad video of the shaking (I had a hard time finding a good place to stand to see it well...after all we were in the midst of a lot of trees):
The farmer told us that we were welcome to pick the cherries left on the trees after shaking (not too many are left...it's pretty amazing) or to pick from the young trees that are too small to shake. We grabbed a couple of buckets and got to picking.
I can't tell you how grateful and happy we were to get all those cherries!
We told them we'd bring them a cherry pie for a thank you and were informed by the farmer's wife that they didn't really love cherry pie! Haha so funny. We will probably still take a pie for those that do like it.
We ended up with a 5 gallon bucket and another smaller bucket full of cherries (we guessed that the smaller bucket was about 3 gallons). The next night Frank and I pitted the smaller bucket of cherries together and it took about 2 hours.
The day after that, I pitted cherries for about 7 hours straight while watching "Parenthood" on my computer. It was a long, sticky time.
This is a huge cooler that we have and it was full of cherries by the time we were done.
Full to the very top!
It was my day off so I knew I had to finish the job...So then I got to canning! Frank helped and we canned 28 quarts and 16 pints of cherries.
I still have one more canner load to do tonight and then we will be all set for over 28 cherry pies! That's a lot of pie.
And they will be perfect!
Awesome! How perfect!
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