This year, the cherries are ripe a few weeks earlier than last year’s harvest. It’s hard to tell from year to year how things will go, but the good news is we can work on the harvest during the two days (!) we have between our family reunion trip and our next guests.
It’s been a hot few days (which is actually good for ripening the fruit) so we took advantage of the cooler mornings. We spent about an hour picking.
Behold, the fruits of our labors! (Hah, bad joke, I know.)
That’s about twenty-five pounds of cherries, the result of cleaning out two trees. Since we have 94 trees, I figure we have at least half a ton of cherries overall. Back at the house, we washed all of them.
Then I bagged everything for my traditional deliveries to friends. This time I made a fun little label for the bags:
Everything went into the refrigerator for the next day’s deliveries.
On that next day, I moved all the bags into a cooler with some ice blocks. Ready to roll!
I made a list of friends who I’d visit with a bag in hand. There were thirty-two of them, scattered all over the Flathead Valley. Off I went. By the end of the day– nearly seven hours later– I’d delivered to twenty-four homes. Several people weren’t home, and I admit I skipped a few others due to time constraints. After all, we still had to get things ready for our upcoming company!
It’s become a fun tradition to package and deliver cherries to friends. Usually we end up chatting a bit. Sometimes it’s just a quick doorstep conversation, and other times I’m invited in for a nice lemonade or something, and we talk for twenty minutes. Good times.