Fruit Week

 

I spent the heat wave picking fruit. As usual, I remembered strawberry season just as it was about to end. Click to enlarge. 

But I got to the field in time for the last of them. It was hot, though there was a breeze and I wore my shade-making straw hat. I always process fruit on the same day I pick it, to preserve the just-picked goodness, so this all got washed and hulled and measured into bags and frozen to make jam with later.

Then it was time to pick sour cherries.

They are my favorite fruit to pick because they are so pretty. Looks like a tree full of candy, doesn't it?

I pitted cherries for hours...

And, because I was running out of room in a freezer already half-filled with strawberries, I preserved a bunch of little jars of cocktail cherries in lightly spiced sugar syrup. These are as delicious as they look.

Then I noticed that red raspberries were already mid-season. Raspberry is my best flavor of homemade jam, so I headed out to another hot field.

I put raspberries through a food mill to remove the seeds. That took hours, but at least at home in the air-conditioned kitchen. So, phew. Fruit week snuck up on me and was the hottest week of the year, but it was a big success.

When the heat dies down a little, I will begin to make jam. Here is my jam jar rainbow from a previous year: strawberry, raspberry, blueberry, peach, plum. All the jars above have been eaten. They were wonderful. Looking forward to this year's.