Here's to Romeo and Juliet

From Gurney's Seed Catalogue.

Two years ago, my time flies fast on the homestead, I bought two cherry trees from Gurney's Seed Co. The sweet eating cherry tree was called Juliet and the tart cooking cherry tree was named Romeo. Being a dyed in the wool Shakespeare fan, I was sold especially when I read hardy in zone 7 in the description. The fact that they were $12 a piece versus their usual price of $49 also grabbed my attention. I love me some cherries! The fact that my grandfather had twelve of them on his lot almost predestined my love of this fruit, but living in Georgia, like I do, I figured it was a foregone conclusion that I'd never have a tree in my orchard. It just didn't get cold enough for long enough. That was until I saw this advertisement.

To make for easier harvests we docked the height of the center trunk at 5' this past winter. We gave it a year for the trees to establish themselves. Left to its own devices these trees would get 25' with a 20' ground coverage area. We don't own a cherry picker nor have that much space in our orchard. We're still on the fence about espalier them too. From the amount of growth and flowers that showed in spring, we knew they were getting all they needed from the compost. Not that we expected any harvestable fruit this year. The bees did their thing and soon tiny cherries appeared. 'They'll all drop off during the fruit drop,' I rationalized. Nobody gets cherries the second year of planting. It can take 5-10 years after planting a tree to get fruit.  Everybody knows this, don't they?

Mother Nature had other ideas. The trees went through their fruit drop. I always think of it as Mother Nature way of selectively aborting excess fruit that would damage the tree. If you think of each fruit reaching maturity as a baby, this makes sense.  Not every fruit is capable of producing viable offspring. Looking at the tree carefully after the purge, there were way too many little cherries on the trees. 'Well, the insects and birds will het them.' I mused.

Remember my organic harvesting rule, 1/3 of the harvest for birds, insects, and disease, and 2/3 got us. Well, it doesn't look like it happened that way this year. It doesn't feel that way to my arms neither as harvesting cherries started this week. I picked a 5-gallon bucket a day worth of cherries off each tree. Every afternoon and evening, I've been canning and freezing cherries. Be it whole fruits, jams, jellies, pie filling, or quarts of juice. My hand us stained with cherry juice. AND, IT'S ONLY THE FIRST WEEK!! By my estimate, I still have two more week's worth of picking to do.

A helpful tip- color code the harvest buckets. I used white upcycled frosting buckets for Juliet's cherries and red, TSC, buckets for Romeo's cherries. This way I knew what cherries to process for what. I've gotten red, white, blue, gray, and yellow buckets from various sources to upcycle.

I'm trying to dehydrate Juliet's cherries this year, I've never tried that before. Five gallons of Romeo's cherries will be made into maraschinos.  For juice I'm marrying Romeo and Juliet for a tangy mixture with the barest addition of sugar. In trying straight Juliet's juice, it was too sweet.

I've calculated two year's worth of canned cherries. in various renditions, and I've hit that mark within the first week. The rest I'll share with various friends and food pantries.

Now why did Mother Nature decide to break all the usual rules for us and the cherry trees this year, I dunno. Maybe she felt bad about all the other failures during spring and summer that she decided to give me a win. All I can say is, "Thank you, Jesus!!" No blessing is over looked.

Y'all have a blessed day!

Cockeyed Jo