Milestone Harvest

I have a thing with sour cherries. Growing up, we always had a sour cherry tree around that we picked gallons of cherries from every spring to keep us in sour cherry pies year round. When I had my first home of my own, the first tree I planted was a sour cherry tree. When I sold that house years later, I hadn't yet harvested enough to make a pie in a single year. So when I moved to this house, I planted another sour cherry tree. It is still there after all these years but only produces a large handful of sour cherries every year. I'm not sure why it hasn't done better. Maybe four or five years ago, I bought another sour cherry tree and stuck it in my backyard. It has outgrown the one in front and is twice the size despite being half as old. This year, for the first time ever in 20+ years, I have enough sour cherries to make a pie, and I still have a lot more cherries on the one in the backyard that weren't ripe enough to pick yet. It might be possible to get two sour cherry pies this year. I'm excited, especially after last year when a late frost killed all the sour cherry blossoms and I didn't even get a single cherry to taste.

While in the picking mode, I also picked what peas the rabbits didn't get. We planted seven or eight rows of peas and if you add up all the plants that remained after the rabbit feast, they wouldn't even fill up one row. Above is a mix of shell and sugar snap peas. Not enough to preserve but enough for a couple meals perhaps so they will have to do.

Readers may recall that last fall, I seeded the entire garden down with Daikon radish to let the tubers poke the clay layer full of holes to absorb moisture better and to work organic matter into the soil. The deer found and ate everything and other than a couple pencil sized tubers, I didn't harvest anything. This spring I tilled everything up and planted our garden. We had quite a few volunteer radish plants come up but they were mostly weeded out in favor of the vegetables we planted. We saved a strip where we eventually planted tomatoes but when I tilled them into the ground, they were very small tubers. I thought that was the end of the Daikon radish experiment.

But recently while planting some late sweetcorn where the peas had been, we noticed a couple volunteer Daikon radish plants growing up in the potato patch. As you can see by the clear ruler, they got quite big. We stuck them in a pan of water for now. I haven't tasted one yet but I'm guessing it is quite woody based on the smaller ones I tried. My wife or MIL say they are going to try making sinigang, a traditional Filipino dish with it. I'll let you know how it tasted.