School trip. Hay ride. U-pick. 10lbs of golden delicious, 5 gala. Hay bales. Two bee stings. Three doughnuts on site (and a dozen to go). One gallon of cider. Applesauce and pie this weekend.

 

Previous Fun

This image is Copyrighted. No unauthorized reuse.

We were blueberry picking the other day and I turned my back for a minute and heard the sound of far more fun than can ever be had picking blueberries. They had, of course, found mud.

It obviously could have been a lot worse. They could have been up to their waists in it. They could have disappeared into the bog, only to be discovered twelve centuries later, with alien archaeologists determining they were creatures who subsisted on a diet entirely of blueberries. Who, you might ask, lets his son wear a white t-shirt while blueberry picking? Apparently I do. 


The only casualties were their shoes, which I had to reach in and slurp out of where they were lodged deep inside the mud. Gross.


Once we got back to picking, we managed a sixteen-pound haul. At $1.60 a pound, that was a lot of blueberries for not a lot of money. The kids were particularly sweet about sharing blueberries with each other as we picked:


And they ate liberally from my buckets as we went along. 


At home,we made about ten more jars of blueberry jam, and about ten jars of blueberries preserved whole in a simple syrup (which we'll use for pancakes all winter). The rest we ate right out of the refrigerator until they were gone.

 

Previous Fun

 

This image is Copyrighted. No unauthorized reuse.

Last week we went picking tart cherries in rural Lenawee County, Michigan with my mom, my sister, and her kids. My mom grew up down there. I guess tart cherries aren't very common for u-pick around the country, but Michigan is all about cherries this time of year. I grew up with a sweet cherry tree in my backyard, but I had never picked tart ones before, and was shocked to see how bright they were filling the trees. They looked like slot machine cherries. Like Pac-Man cherries:

It wasn't as easy for the kids to help, but the girl is super into u-picking these days so she found a way to climb the trees and managed a sizable haul of about three pounds.

The boy was a little frustrated he couldn't climb as well as his sister, but he managed to pick plenty on branchs that had fallen where fruit still grew. It didn't really matter because anything he picked either ended up in his belly or on the ground

He did love the cherry pitting machine back at the checkout. Cherries were 60 cents a pound unpitted, 85 cents a pound pitted. We picked fourteen pounds and opted to pay the extra couple bucks to get them pitted:

It was totally worth it, not only to watch them go through the machine. . .

But also to get home, wash them, and just throw them right into the pot to make jam. This was about half of what we picked:

It boiled down to about six pints of jam, and it set really nicely. I added a little bit of cinnamon and nutmeg with the sugar, and in the end it still tastes a little tart but as sweet and delicious as a cherry pie.

As you can tell, we are really into picking berries and canning this year, probably because we are also really into peanut butter and jam sandwiches and there's such a sense of accomplishment to look at all those cans and know that the jam on your sandwich came from fruit you picked. We don't mind driving a ways to find a remote farm, and have decided to avoid any of those u-pick farms with all the amenities like petting zoos, corn mazes, and playgrounds. It seems like the further you go out, the cheaper the fruit is by the pound. Besides, who needs zoos, mazes, or jungle gyms when you can climb all over an old tractor?

Next up: gooseberries, red and black currants, raspberries and blueberries.

 

Previous Fun

This image is Copyrighted. No unauthorized reuse.