The Sour Cherry Saga

 I'm wrote this before our road trip which we currently are on. If things went well, we are somewhere east of Chicago by now. Comments are welcome though there may be a delay of some days before I am able to publish them.

During my boyhood years, there was a large sour cherry tree on our home farm and also another one on my grandfather's farm. We would pick many gallons from them every last spring and it would keep us in sour cherry pies, cobblers and jelly for the rest of the year. For some reason, the taste of those sour cherry pies, cobblers and jellies have stuck with me over the years and I have always hoped that someday I could have some of my own.

Many years later, I would finally have a home of my own and once we had something that resembled a bit of savings account, I bought and planted a sour cherry tree in the backyard. It finally got big enough to start producing a cup or two of fruit a year when we decided to sell that house and move to where we are now. After some time of focusing on more important projects, I planted another sour cherry tree in our front yard, two more down at the farm at our new orchard and a few years later, a fourth in our backyard. With every planting I'm hopeful that eventually I will have gallons of sour cherries for myself again.

The one in the front yard of our house has been producing a couple cups of fruit a year until last year when a late frost killed production. This year I was pleased to see it had fruit on it and as I mowed lawn today (as I write this), they were ripe so I picked them. I probably got two cups worth so par for the course, especially considering we did a heavy prune on it last winter.

The two down at the farm were really small, bought on discount, and are only about waist high so I'm not expecting any fruit from them anytime soon. The fourth one in the backyard, we bought as a larger specimen than all the others started out at but has never really produced fruit until this year. It is loaded with cherries but for some reason, they are quite away behind their brethren in the front yard despite being the same species of sour cherry. At this point, with just a week to go before our road trip, I'm not sure that we will be around to pick any from it. But it is nice to know that between the two, had I been around, I might at last be pushing my dream of getting a pie's worth of them picked.