Can she bake a cherry pie, Billy Boy? and other Americana for the 4th

First of all, the answer to the question posed:

This may not look like the cherry pies you’re used to. The pie cherries didn’t look like what I’m used to.

Some years ago, long before I had anything serious to do with this place, Ben had an Ag-science grad student living in his pig sty (not as bad as it sounds, it had been converted to a guest residence by the time I saw it) and charged her with selecting some fruit trees for what is now our orchard.

I don’t know how much you know about cherries, but they thrive best is there are a couple of different varieties planted to cross-pollinate. Debra planted a pie cherry next to a Royal Anne (really next to it, for years I thought it was one tree). I used to nag Ben about not watering one side of the tree enough. Then I tasted the cherries and discovered we had pie cherries. Whoopee!

I don’t know what variety they are. When ripe, they are a dark reddish black like Bings. But they have an intense cherry flavor. I’ve never seen them before. But tonight we’ll be really taste-testing them for the first time. Ben’s “pigeon abatement program” succeeded wildly, and he said if he didn’t get at least one cherry pie (weird in itself–he doesn’t even like sweet stuff although he maintains he will eat anything I grow and so far he’s been true to that), he’d be really disgusted.

Here’s what our crop looks like this year. Pie cherries:

Royal Annes: I was going to show you these as well, but Adobe is not cooperating and I’m out of patience.

Here’s the current state of the blueberry crop:

There’s nothing for scale here, but most of these berries are about the size of a nickel.

And here are the raspberries:

Again, nothing for scale, but the last two days I’ve picked a quart or so each day in my miniscule patch, and there are that many more out there now. I’m giving them away as fast as I can. I baked a raspberry-custard tart and took it to my writing group yesterday. It disappeared in an instant.

I probably wouldn’t be writing this now, except for the fact that I’ve been uncharacteristically silent. As a result, some people that I really care a lot about have written to see if I’m all right. And of course I am, I’m just totally overwhelmed by the garden and the produce and so on. It’s summer on the Big Elk.

My largest and most enthusiastic cabbage heads are spitting, so I’ve got to go make sauerkraut. That’s the bad news. The good news is that the sauerkraut will actually be ready in September for Oktoberfest, a first.