A few weeks later, we went with the Carroll family out to the Whitby cherry orchard in Basin City and picked about 20 more gallons.
Again, we ate and ate cherries, shared with friends, and I attempted to dry some. However, it was extremely time consuming to cut each cherry in half and pit it.
Last weekend, we got 240 lbs. of frozen, halved and pitted cherries from Uncle Ivan that were otherwise going to go to waste. Now---more cherries! I'm in the process of drying them and making fruit leather. Bryant would like to try cherry jam. It takes about 16 cups cherry puree to make a batch of fruit leather with the six trays that I have borrowed from Mom. As of now, it takes about 40 minutes to prepare a batch and 8 hours for it to dry. I think I've made it through nearly 20 lbs. of cherries.
As I've worked on cherries, I think I've come up with our Christmas present to our neighbors and home teaching and visiting teaching families. A gift basket containing cherry fruit leather, a small bag of trail mix containing dried cherries, cherry jam, and perhaps a small loaf of homemade bread. The tag may say something like, "One of the great blessings we've noticed this year is a bounteous sweet cherry harvest. Hope you have noticed many sweet blessings in your life this year..."
James left this morning for his summer inservice in Portland, headquarters for his new Oregon area. I miss his companionship. We spent the afternoon at Grandma Gibbon's pool. Sariah started to do underwater somersaults.
Talmage was practicing his multiplication tables this afternoon with Hyrum and had him laughing as hard as I've seen him laugh. I got a minute or two of it on video. Wish I would have used the digital camera and I could try my first video post.
No comments:
Post a Comment