What's Growing in the Garden

Good looking cherries, Tim. We contemplated planting some apple and cherry trees in our yard, but have decided not to and rather go with something ornamental.

But we're also on the doorstep of Door County, WI, with a good number of cherry and apple orchards within a 30 minute drive, so finding a place to pick cherries and apples for a reasonable cost is not difficult.

After you pit the cherries, make some cherry pit syrup before you toss the pits out. Mix 1c of cherry pits with 1/2c sugar and let sit, covered, until the sugar has dissolved - probably 12 to 24 hours. Sugar is hydroscopic, so it will draw water out of the pits, along with a lot of good cherry flavor. After the sugar is dissolved, strain through a fine mesh strainer. If you want to get any sugar, etc. left on the pits, a teaspoon or two of water will help. Mix a pinch of salt into the syrup to balance the flavor. And then you've got a delicious cherry syrup great for mixing into drinks, a little over ice cream, etc.

We like using it to make Old Fashioneds with - a splash of the cherry pit syrup over ice, brandy or bourbon (my wife prefers brandy, I prefer bourbon), and then we use lemon or lime flavored sparking water in place of the Squirt or 7up.

We also like making cherry bounce. Put 1c cherries into a quart mason jar, 1/2 to 1c sugar, depending on how sweet you want it, and top up the jar with your booze of choice. I like it with bourbon. Brandy is also good. Some do vodka. I have heard rum is good and want to try that. Let sit on the shelf for 4 to 6 months, then it's ready to drink - and the cherries to eat.
 
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BTW, 1c of sugar in the bounce is way too sweet for us. But I know some people like it that sweet. We've done about 1/2c before and I will probably do about 1/3c in the jars for this year's batch.
 
ripjack13 said:
Does that attract slugs or is just my garden?
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We don't ever really have a problem with slugs, clippings or not. I use a really thick layer, 6-8" deep, before it compresses from the rain and walking. I'd think the slugs wouldn't like going across the dried grass, but lots of differences between our areas....
 
Sprung said:
Good looking cherries, Tim. We contemplated planting some apple and cherry trees in our yard, but have decided not to and rather go with something ornamental.

But we're also on the doorstep of Door County, WI, with a good number of cherry and apple orchards within a 30 minute drive, so finding a place to pick cherries and apples for a reasonable cost is not difficult.

After you pit the cherries, make some cherry pit syrup before you toss the pits out. Mix 1c of cherry pits with 1/2c sugar and let sit, covered, until the sugar has dissolved - probably 12 to 24 hours. Sugar is hydroscopic, so it will draw water out of the pits, along with a lot of good cherry flavor. After the sugar is dissolved, strain through a fine mesh strainer. If you want to get any sugar, etc. left on the pits, a teaspoon or two of water will help. Mix a pinch of salt into the syrup to balance the flavor. And then you've got a delicious cherry syrup great for mixing into drinks, a little over ice cream, etc.

We like using it to make Old Fashioneds with - a splash of the cherry pit syrup over ice, brandy or bourbon (my wife prefers brandy, I prefer bourbon), and then we use lemon or lime flavored sparking water in place of the Squirt or 7up.

We also like making cherry bounce. Put 1c cherries into a quart mason jar, 1/2 to 1c sugar, depending on how sweet you want it, and top up the jar with your booze of choice. I like it with bourbon. Brandy is also good. Some do vodka. I have heard rum is good and want to try that. Let sit on the shelf for 4 to 6 months, then it's ready to drink - and the cherries to eat.
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I'm surprised the cherry syrup made like that doesn't draw cyanide with it...
 
Definitely going to make some pit syrup, never heard of that before, but sounds great!

We've also got our wild black raspberries just starting to ripen. Will freeze some for pies and make jam and syrup with the rest.

When I was living in WI, we would make a couple trips a year to Door County as you said, once in summer for the cherries and another in the fall for the apples. As close as you are to Door County, I wouldn't have planted the fruit trees either.
 
Mr. Peet said:
I'm surprised the cherry syrup made like that doesn't draw cyanide with it...
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Did a little reading to check on that. Every source I read indicated that as long as you aren't cracking the pits, the amygdalin (cyanide precursor present in the inner kernal) won't leach out. If one wanted to be overly cautious, boiling the pits with water and sugar to make a syrup, would "neutralize" the amygdalin.

Interesting factoid - in Europe and other areas, the inner kernal called noyaux is harvested, heat treated, and used as a flavoring agent that is similar to bitter almonds.
 
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Yeah, the pit syrup is good - has great cherry flavor and doesn't take much to bring a nice flavor or a little sweetness to a drink. We stumbled upon it by accident last year. My wife was thinking there was something you could do with cherry pits, but she couldn't remember what it was. Cherry pit syrup showed up in the search results. It was definitely not what she was maybe thinking it was - she still doesn't know what it was she was hoping we'd find in a search result - but we tried the cherry pit syrup and it was very good. I read the same notes about the cyanide/amygdalin as Tim did.

I confirmed with my wife that this year she does not want us to get the cherries pitted so we can make more pit syrup. Good thing I bought a nice pitter last year when one of the times we went cherry picking - and picked 15 quarts of cherries - to get up to the barn and find out that their pitting machine broke while we were picking. We bought one of these and it works pretty well.
 
Thanks for the link on the pitter, going to pick one up, especially with my tree coming into production.

Glad we went and picked earlier. Our dry spell is now over. Just finished a "little" thunderstorm with 45mph winds (last reading on weather station before power went out), nickle sized hail, and 2.5"rain in 20 minutes. At 9:00 pm, the prediction was for 0.2" rain for the night, now prediction is for 4.75" by morning.:scare3: I know that's not a lot compared to what you guys in the south get from some of those storms, but it's a lot for us.

Going to be a long, hot night without power. The way the winds were blowing, a good portion of our area is without power and probably lots of trees down on power lines.
 
One note on that pitter - if your cherries are on the smaller side, like the Montmorency Tart I pitted with it last year, I found that it works best to feed a few at a time from a handful rather than just load up the hopper and let gravity feed it for you. The small ones sometimes fall through easily, moreso if there's a large pile behind them. Even hand feeding them like that, it was easy to get into a rhythm where I was feeding them as fast as I could work the plunger. A few will get through with pits still in them. But it sure beats doing it one or two at a time.

We had a high wind storm here last night, but not as much rain, nor as heavy of a rain. I thought the power was certainly going to go out here, but it didn't. Hope your power is back on soon!

But the rain we did get was so welcome. We haven't had rain in a while and everything was so dry. Not sure how much we got - I doubt it was even an inch. But before it rained, we were more than 5" behind normal rainfall.
 
4.5" of rain in less than 12 hours in Tucson would be a real turd floater. We need some, but I have all kinds of cabinets outside I'm working on, so I don't need to see any rain for at least another week.... Jerry (in Tucson)
 
Got power back finally, 3.5" in the rain gauge, but probably more with the horizontal winds.

Good news is I won't have to water anything for quite a while, bad news is I'm going to be spending that time with a chainsaw......

A red and a white pine snapped off about 10 ft up, the largest of the two is about 18" diameter at the break. At least they had the good sense to miss a couple of young walnut trees and tulip poplar when they fell.

Lost about a 8" diameter branch out of the top of a red maple, and the silver maple shed a lot of 2-4" branches.

Big mess mostly from the pines, but no structures damaged, so all is good. I'll post some pictures later, but need to let devices charge now that power is back on.
 
trc65 said:
Got power back finally, 3.5" in the rain gauge, but probably more with the horizontal winds.

Good news is I won't have to water anything for quite a while, bad news is I'm going to be spending that time with a chainsaw......

A red and a white pine snapped off about 10 ft up, the largest of the two is about 18" diameter at the break. At least they had the good sense to miss a couple of young walnut trees and tulip poplar when they fell.

Lost about a 8" diameter branch out of the top of a red maple, and the silver maple shed a lot of 2-4" branches.

Big mess mostly from the pines, but no structures damaged, so all is good. I'll post some pictures later, but need to let devices charge now that power is back on.
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I'm glad it turned out well in the end.
 
Here are some pictures of the damage.

The two trees snapped off 12-15' high.

pines1.webp

The one just missed the young walnut.

pines2.webp

Braches scattered over ~ 2 acres of the front yard. In the back just behind the power pole is the red maple that lost it's top.

pines3.webp

A little different view showing the pines that are left along our drive.

pines4.webp
 
Down here when we get pine tree damage like that during a thunderstorm it is an indication that there may have been a little twister come through. These yellow pines are pretty flexible and it takes a strong sustained wind to break one off. When that hurricane went through Lake Charles a year or so ago it sheared the tops off of all the trees along the interstate. Cat 4 winds will do that.

Alan
 
Nothing more than cutting them up and dragging to the burn pile. I may cut a blank or two from the larger pine, but really have no interest in saving much of them.
 
I did save a small crotch section out of the red maple (8"diameter main branch) that I sealed. Will spin it sometime and see if any nice grain shows up to make a vase.
 
Alan R McDaniel Jr said:
Down here when we get pine tree damage like that during a thunderstorm it is an indication that there may have been a little twister come through. These yellow pines are pretty flexible and it takes a strong sustained wind to break one off. When that hurricane went through Lake Charles a year or so ago it sheared the tops off of all the trees along the interstate. Cat 4 winds will do that.

Alan
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Just heard that we did have a small EF 1 tornado that was confirmed a few miles east of us.

On the way to town tonight to grab a sandwich, saw a ~1500 bu hopper bin laying in the middle of corn field about a half mile from where it was previously sitting.
 
One day the neighbor lady called me over. She had a peach tree in her back yard and she said she had gotten all the peaches that she wanted and I could have the rest if I wanted them. I, of course, said sure and went back there to see the tree. Lots of peaches on the higher branches. I asked her if I could bring a ladder over the next day to get them and she OKed that. It was late so I went home to count mason jars. That night a storm blew in and I was pretty sure a little twister went over the house. I twisted a bunch of limbs out of the oak trees. The next morning I found out that it had hit a storage facility about 500 yards from the house and destroyed it.

So, I got my buckets and ladder and went to get peaches. There were none. None on the tree and none on the ground. I mean every last peach on that tree had been sucked up and then it rained peaches somewhere. Didn't hurt or move another thing in her yard.

Those little dudes just hop around sometimes eating peaches and destroying buildings...

Alan
 
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