Behold the yet unfinished goat stand in my new milking parlor. (I’ll explain more about this goat milk stand, and why it’s built the way it’s built, in a future post when the milking parlor is complete.) Meanwhile, yesterday, it was time to bring aboard my new milking staff for measurements in the stand. Right now, I have Fanta and Cookie Doe in milk. Cookie Doe is a Nigerian Dwarf, which is a dairy breed, while Fanta is a Fainter, a meat breed, so Cookie Doe got the job. Cookie Doe has never been milked.
As soon as I reached under and touched her teats, she ripped off her Sassafras Farm ID badge and hightailed it outta there, so we’ve got a lot of employee training ahead.
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I’ve been picking cherries for the last couple of days.
I have a LOT of cherries.
The birds are causing no trouble whatsoever. In fact, I may put up a sign for the birds soon. With arrows.
CHERRIES —> HERE!
The trouble is that some of the cherries are up high. Very high. I started with picking the cherries that I could reach from the ground. Then I got a ladder. Then I climbed higher on the ladder.
And now I’m a little scared, so I’m not sure how many more cherries I’m getting, though the cherries are awfully tempting. Some of the ground around the tree is level, and some of the ground is not, so there’s an element of danger in using a ladder and going too high on sloped ground. In the foreground of the above photo, you can see how the ground slopes down to the driveway. There are a lot of cherries up there, but I’m not sure how to get them.
Yesterday, I sugar-packed four pounds of cherries. Cherries, they don’t wait, but canning them must, so I sugar-packed them to put them on hold until I’m not so busy. (This has been a wild week.) Here’s how: Wash, stem, and pit cherries. I pit the cherries by making a small slit with a sharp knife at the stem-end….
….then popping out the pit.
Add 1/4 cup sugar per 1 cup cherries.
Freeze.
Easy!
I’m not sure what I’m going to do with these cherries. I’m tempted by a brandied cherries recipe. I should be able to pick enough more cherries to do a round of jam, too, and then we’ll see how many more I can get because–did I mention, they’re HIGH? I don’t like to give up cherries, but I like to live, too. I can’t believe how many cherries there are on this tree. When using the cherries, I’ll take into account that there is 1/4 cup sugar per cup cherries already and adjust the recipe accordingly.
My neighbor Jim told me that there used to be two cherry trees here. The other one was on the other side of the drive. Now I know what that stump was that I had removed last winter when they were here with the backhoe working on the collapsed septic pipe.
Picking cherries is fun, and the pitting isn’t too bad, though it’s the only bad thing about cherries. It took me 1 1/2 hours to pit the four pounds of cherries yesterday. (I think I’m pretty slow.) I asked Morgan if she wanted to learn to pit cherries. I tried to say this like learn to ride a horse or learn to drive! SO EXCITING AND FUN. She said no. Hunh.
Strange girl!
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