Garlic and Cherries

Over the weekend Harold and I picked 5 ice cream pails full of cherries from a friend's farm.   They have many large cherry trees.  These are sour cherries for pies and cooking.  Cherries are one of my favorite fruits.  So I made 12 jars of my favorite  cherry ice cream topping, and 6 jars of jam.  Today I am using up some in a filling for a coffeecake, and the rest I will try freezing in bags this year.  The cherry season is very short, so you have to work with them immediately as they are quite fragile.   This is why a person rarely sees fresh sour cherries at the supermarket.   Check out these beauties!

Lovely cherries ready to cook with.  It's a lot of work to pit all the fruit, but a cherry pitter makes the work easier.   And even after all the work, it is SO worth it for all the wonderful things you can do with cherries!

Here are 2 of the 5 buckets we picked.

Besides working with cherries, it is time to harvest garlic.  I planted garlic in my greenhouse last October.  It was covered with a heavy layer of straw during the winter.  In April we un-covered the garlic area and soon the plants emerged.  Now that it is July, the garlic is ready to harvest!  I will dry it for a couple weeks, then clean up the bulbs and sell some at market, keep plenty for myself, and also keep some for replanting for next year's crop.   Garlic is so easy to grow that I wonder why more people don't try it.

I am holding a dozen heads of freshly harvested garlic grown in the greenhouse.  I have about 6 times this much to harvest yet.  The smell of the fresh garlic makes my kitchen smell like a real Polish kitchen!  When the heads dry a little, I will trim the roots and cut off the dry stems and store the heads in a cool dark place (like the pantry).