Early Harvest

We are in a spell of perfect weather right now.  How refreshing it is to feel fifty degrees each morning and a gentle slide from the seventies in the evenings.  It's just warm enough for the children to enjoy a little water play and just cool enough for me to work in the garden without fear of overheating.

We picked black cherries last night.  It was a good year for them, though they are small despite the rain and floods.  Cherry picking is usually a one-time effort for us.  The season is very short--the fruit was falling on us as we picked!  In the last light of the day, in the cool of the long shadows, it was so nice.  These cherries will go to jam, as they nearly always do.  It prolongs the harvest in the most efficient way.

There are other cherry trees besides my grandmother's--the Swing Place and the Settler's Museum.  My hope is to check those trees in the coming days and see what we find.  This next three months are devoted to food collection and preservation on a moment's notice.  It is exciting, frugal, and a little exhausting, but it is a pleasure to see our own stores grow as the Summer goes.

In our times, of course, these kind of efforts are not truly necessary, but they do bring such joy and substance to life.  My thoughts match well with this segment of Victorian Farm.  There is so much fruit just waiting for someone to come and collect it.  The birds have more than their fair share and don't mind a bit.  My own childhood had a lot of berry and cherry picking in it, and I wish the same for our children.  June second is forever in my memory as the day we pick cherries.