Picking Cherries

You know what's really fun lately?

I have pickers!

I've always had toddlers and babies to wrangle, and if you
don't already know from your own experience, you can probably
guess just how much picking can be accomplished while herding
short people and carrying a baby!!

This summer however, four big'uns went out and brought back
Huckleberries enough to fill 4 gallon bags for the freezer!

The most recent novel adventure was a Cherry picking venture.

We were at our local one-stop country store/diner/post office sipping
milk shakes, when my children spied some trees ripe with cherries out back.

Permission was generously granted, so we packed a picnic dinner,
some cans, a ladder, and some lawn chairs (I pick vicariously from a lawn
chair these days!) and set to!

What a beautiful setting it was!
I just soaked in the warm twilight rays, the greenness - even for the midst of summer -
batted at mosquitoes and couldn't help but be mesmerized watching these wonderful
children that call me theirs.

Zack had  high hopes of picking several five gallon buckets full, but we don't have a
great way to pit cherries for freezing so they needed to be eaten fresh (oh drat).

They picked quite a lot, Aloria picked some up off the ground,
and I was handed a few fistfuls to taste-test...
Some were rather wormy.  You know what they say about that, right?

There's only one thing worse than finding a worm in a Cherry...

Finding half a worm.

I was veeeeerrry careful to look for worms.
And if I didn't look - I popped that cherry right in so I'd never be in danger
of finding even half a worm. :-)

Mmmm... they were so summer-good!  Maybe cherry picking is a new tradition.

Perhaps next year we'll buy a pitter :-)