Cherry season is here! This morning we drove to Harrisburg to Detering Orchards as they are open on Sundays and have u-pick cherries for $1.39 a pound. We do u-pick stuff often but for the life of me I can never remember to bring a step ladder to pick cherries! The low hanging fruit goes quickly and so I'm left starring up into a tree full of fruit that I can't reach. One gal was on the roof of her car under a tree picking. Another family had their snow/ice scraper out to hit branches. Others were smart and brought step ladders. Nope. Not us.
Cliff is pretty great as he is tall and can reach things that other can't. He did a good job picking on his own as I slowly climbed a small tree and slowly grabbed a few handfuls of cherries. I quickly realized that I needed to get down as I have never been a tree climber and I didn't need to start while picking cheap cherries.
I had the brilliant idea of getting on Cliff's shoulders to pick some choice fruit just out of our reach. Let me just say that as an adult I have never gotten on top of someone's shoulders. It's hard to do! I was fairly positive that I was going to break Cliff (despite the fact that he can pretty much squat my weight at the gym). I was very awkward and nervous.
I had one of those moments, awkwardly balancing on his shoulders, where I was reaffirmed that Cliff is undoubtedly the one for me. As I'm trying to get him to move so that I can reach new fruit, he calming says "I prefer to respond to gee and haw." Are you kidding me? We are in the brink of disaster and you are being nerdy and trying to teach me about draft animal commands? Holy cow. I love you. I had to keep myself from laughing as I was pretty sure I was going to crush him/fall to injury at any moment. With this said, I was so impressed with our efforts that I had to take a photo to document this momentous occasion.
I continued to grab handfuls of cherries without looking to see if they were worth the effort. With a sweaty fist full of cherries, I had a moment where I could see us filling out insurance paperwork about an incident. I felt stupid when I had to say we had a spill while I was on his shoulders picking fruit. With this, I asked to get down. Now this is where I almost injured Cliff. First I panicked and put my hands over his eyes/sunglasses. Then I went for the hands. I went wobbly. Thankfully, I made it down alive and Cliff was injury free.
All in all we picked about 6.5 pounds of cherries. We got more rhubarb to make a cobbler tonight. We also got two enormous cabbages for $1.25 (buy one get one free!) so that we have backup when we pull our next batch of sauerkraut from the crock in 10 days. It was a pretty successful trip.
When we got home we pitted the cherries with straws and chopsticks and now our hands are died red. We have two full sheet pans in the freezer so I hope we have at least a gallon to put up for later in the year. Fingers crossed!
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