The Pits!

I hope everyone had a wonderful 4th of July and hopefully you got to have a long weekend to go along with it! As for us, it has rained nearly every day BUT I am not complaining after the desert-like conditions we had last year! Our garden is definitely in over-drive because of all of the rain. We have 2 more huge bowls of peas that are waiting to be shelled and I am sure there are wax beans up there waiting for us also.

Today, however, was dedicated to cherries. Not the 6 gallons I brought home from my parents' house - these are black cherries we found while we were riding the horses in our favorite field. We picked close to a gallon of cherries so today I made jam! Yum! Unfortunately it was quite an ordeal and this had BETTER be good jam!! The cherries were most likely wild cherries so they were a lot smaller than the other cherries we pick. They were too small for my hand-held pitter which works like a syringe - they would poke all the way through the bottom. My super-de-duper cherry pitter hasn't come in yet that I ordered last week so we resorted to some interesting methods today to de-pit these suckers!

Here is my canning day in pictures and captions:

Aren't they pretty? Here are the cherries after picking.

Since we didn't have the pitter, we had to figure out a way to get the pits out before I could do anything. I simmered them for a little while to cook them down just a bit thinking that would be easier to squeeze the pits out. We tried putting them through the Squeezo - NOPE - very bad idea...Next we got a strainer and stirred and stirred and stirred trying to break them down through the strainer. That worked some but the 'meat' of the cherries wasn't going through much. Finally in a last desperate attempt to finish them (and NOT kill my husband who wanted to bore bigger holes into my strainer) I broke out the salad spinner hoping to 'spin' the cherries off of the pits. YES! It worked - mostly. Better than the other methods and we were able to get most of the good part of the cherries off and into the pot to cook! I don't have any pictures of those steps because my nerves were becoming a little shot at this point and if I was holding a heavy object in my hand it might have been heaved at a certain someone...

Here we're cooking the jam down and adding all of it's jam-stuff...It smelled soooooo good!

The jars are waiting ever-so-patiently to be filled. We ended up getting 4 pints of jam out of the cherries.

After filling, they process for 10 minutes. This time is used to clean the 3/4 of my kitchen that is covered in cherry juice, skins, and pits including myself...

And last but not least (eating would technically be last though I guess) WE...HAVE...JAM! My favorite part is hovering near the kitchen to hear them 'pop' to make sure they seal. I always count my 'pops' to make sure they all sealed and they did! I am not sure I have ever NOT had something seal - knock on wood. Now they are sitting and cooling until tomorrow and will be stored in the pantry until it's cherry time!

Whew - I am exhausted! So that was my day. OH - before I forget, Logan and I had a wonderful lunch with my 'City Mouse' friend Becca and her husband Blake and little boy Trent. They were on their way back home and stopped by for an awesome lunch. I miss you guys and wish you were closer!!


Have a good Monday and 'Farm Girl Fun' will no doubt continue all of this week while we work to get everything put away before we head to the beach on Saturday! I'll keep everyone updated...hopefully I can sneak some knitting in while I am at it!