Coveting The Cherries

Berries, Birds, Cherries, Reflections

As quickly as spring turned into summer, strawberry season turned into cherry, blueberry and currants season.

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As my husband and I sat on the deck yesterday, looking at all of the cherries that needed to be picked, he commented that he was surprised that we hadn’t seen any robins eating the cherries. I told him I would pick cherries tomorrow.

Along toward evening Scout needed to go outside and as I opened the door to take him out a robin flew out of the cherry tree. It had a ripe cherry in it’s beak and flew on top of our neighbors house so I could watch it eat it’s prize.

It is now game on – to see who can get the cherries first.

As soon as Scout was done with his business I got busy picking cherries. We didn’t have a cherry crop at all last year but the tree seems to be making up for it this year.

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I picked about a quart of cherries while the robin sat on the neighbors house and chirped at me. As darkness began to fall the mosquitos chased me inside.

I picked another two quarts this morning. For now I am just freezing the cherries but as soon as this extreme heat wave is over and we turn off the air conditioning I will be baking a cherry pie.

There are still enough cherries left on the tree for me to pick a couple more quarts and the robin to have it’s share as well.

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(The above photo was taken in 2016)

What is your favorite kind of fruit pie?

39 thoughts on “Coveting The Cherries”

  1. I love cherries, l can eat them, well l can, but l would find myself in a predicament stomach wise, but not being a lover of pie’s that much, the one pie l loved was cherry pie .. mm, how l miss cherry pie 🙂

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    1. Oh yes Apple pie is wonderful – even just the smell. Sadly we didn’t get any rhubarb this year. We almost lost our plants because of all the rain they were just sitting in water. My husband moved them to higher ground and they are coming back so maybe next year we will have a good crop.

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  4. Pingback: *Press it* Coveting The Cherries #90 | Its good to be crazy Sometimes

      1. Loved it! I only have 2 bushes but they give me about 3 gallons of blueberries every year. What I do to keep the birds away is hang the heavy aluminum pans (I cut them in half) and hang them from a steel post by a twine. The wind blows and bangs the pan against the post and it is so noisy. It has worked all these years.

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  13. Good thing you treated the robin or it would be payback time for you – they are entertaining to watch, and lovely to listen to (although you have the one at 4:00 a.m. that wakes you up) but if you do something they don’t like, watch out. My mom was a big pie eater – never blueberry as she got those and froze them for muffins in the dead of Winter. I guess I’d say strawberry rhubarb. My mom used to make red currant pie – it was hard to get those berries and only one produce market carried them, and not many, just a few pints every so often when they could get them. They were good but quite tart – you have to like tart berries.

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    1. A few weeks ago we had a robin that kept flying into our window. We have no idea why but for a week or 10 days it would fly into the window over and over throughout the day. If we stood by the window it would go away but would return later.
      We didn’t have a rhubarb crop this year because of so much rain. My husband moved the plants (roots) to a different garden area and they are coming back but this year are strawberry pie will be missing the rhubarb.
      Currants are very tart but loaded with vitamin C (when raw). I usually make juice or wine with them. I never thought of making pie. It would take LOTS of currants for one pie and they have so many little seeds. When they are baked into a pie do the seeds soften up?

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      1. Gee Ruth, I can’t remember if the little seeds were gone or not. It was not soggy. It was very tart and my mom’s favorite pie and I was not a big pie eater, preferring cookies. ( It has to be 20 years since my mom made it – she has been gone almost 10 years and the only produce store that carried the berries, suddenly went out of business. It was a popular market and on 12/31___ (not sure the year), at the close of business (and they had many types of baked goods, like Stahl’s Bakery goodies as well as a lot of specialty spices, oils, breads, crackers, cheeses). the owner assembled the employees, thanked them for their service, gave them a paycheck and told them to take anything they wanted from the store as it was closing that day. People still talk about that in the Facebook forums about Downriver things that are no longer there. They also sold Christmas trees and flats of flowers, beautiful mums in Fall – they took up a whole corner (busy corner) … we read about it in the local paper and no one has ever taken over Andy’s Farm Market – that is because it fell into disrepair and unbelievably, the owner did not take home, sell, give away what food his employees did not take with them (they were likely in shock) and he left it there – rats got in and reporters at the local paper would write about watching the rats run back and forth on the window ledges. One of our clients (The Guidance Center) is located next door and tried repeatedly to buy the property to be used for parking and the owner won’t sell it. Very bizarre!

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      2. Interesting little piece of history. I wonder why the owner won’t sell.
        My dad says he remembers seeing currants in the grocery store when he was young (not sure where) but it is something you don’t see today.

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      3. Yes, it didn’t make sense to anyone why he up and left like that – it was a prime piece of real estate and you had to fight for a parking spot on a weekend.

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      5. At one time currants were banned in the US because of a disease they can carry that can spread to other trees. I believe they are still no allowed in some states.
        The other issue with growing them commercially may be that harvesting them is A LOT of work. I am not sure that there is any efficient way to do it so probably not enough profit to be made.

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      6. That is interesting and sounds like a good reason … they are so small that it does take a lot of them to make a juicy pie. I used to go to Westborn Market in Dearborn to get us tasty, crusty bread and even they never carried red currants and I thought Westborn carried everything produce you could ever want. I used to buy my mom red currant jelly there though. They were the only store that carried it, and it was a very small jar.

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  14. I’m glad you are getting cherries this year. I remember when we were growing up we could count on hearing a loud booming noise coming from the nearby orchard during cherry season. They used some sort of cannon to scare the birds away. Pie is my favorite dessert, I really cant choose a favorite.

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