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A to Z Challenge: Cherries, Cactus, Coffee, and Creating
Some of my favorite things start with the letter C!
Along with our apple trees, our home fruit orchard had cherry trees as well. These were sour cherries called Montmorency. They were usually ready to harvest around July Fourth, sometimes a week or two before that, in June. If we didn’t harvest fast enough, the birds had a feast!
When the cherries were ready to harvest, everything stopped until the trees were picked clean. The varieties we grew were Montmorency and Kristen, both sour cherries. We froze a lot of the cherries. But we also made a cherry coffee cake with a recipe we got from Door County, and dried them to use in other baked goods like biscotti. Cherry pies are not always a reliable bake but when they turn out, they are delicious. I made sour cherry jam one year and also some cherry bounce (a liquor). Cherries were one of my favorite fruits to grow in our home orchard. Many of our friends were beneficiaries of them too.
