Dehydrated Cherries

The week before last we got invited to our friends farm again and got to gleam the end of their cherry harvest again. 

This is such a great opportunity and it gives us so many options when it comes to preserving them.

Most years we can loads, but we still have a fair few in the pantry, so this year we decided to freeze the lions share and dehydrate the rest. 

Preserving As A Social Activity

 One thing I mention a lot when I give my talks on preserving is how much I think it should be a social activity. It's far nicer to share the tasks and the harvests, it creates community, strengthens friendships and is just a down right productive use of your time. 

I'm lucky as I have a few friends that I can share this passion with. 

This week I did some of the social preserving I preach. My friend Lauren, who farms cherries and apricots, messaged me to say they had lots of fruit in need of preserving and did I fancy an afternoon working through it. 

Cherries!

Few fruits I love more than properly ripe cherries 

But few things do I struggle growing more. 

We netted our trees but still struggle to get more than a few berries. Time to go to the professionals. 

Fruit Tree Nursery 2014

Last weekend I finally managed to finish grafting and planting all of my fruit trees.

 I planted them in two separate beds quite close together to try to encourage them to grow straight and true. I 've also experimented a little bit as one lot was planted through some old weed suppressant matting I had left from ages ago and the other will be mulched with straw

In these two little beds is hopefully my future cider orchard, some apricots and nectarines to see if I can get them to grow in our cold spot, cherries so we can have delicious stone fruit in the summer, plums and pears to grow around the veg garden and some more apple trees to grow and sell.

140 in total this year, should be interesting to see how they do.

Did anyone else get round to doing any grafting this year?

Storing Grafting Wood

In the fridge, above the yogurts and beside the butter, there is a bag of wood.

Keeping this sort of thing in our fridge is not completely unusual in our house.

The bags contain scion wood of 18 different varieties of apple, cherry, apricot, plum and pear trees that I will use for grafting at the end of this month. Each variety is stored with a wet bit of newspaper around it's base and then wrapped in cling film with a label stating what tree it is. I check these every few weeks to make sure they haven't dried out and they are kept so they won't ever freeze.

I found quite a bit of conflicting information about storing scion wood on a small scale so I hope this is the best way. Anyone else storing scion wood at the moment?

Cherry

Well I've eaten my entire cherry crop. Two cherries.

I planted some cherry trees earlier this year and to my surprise when I walked down the field I found these two beauties just asking to be eaten.

I was quite please as this is the first year that they've been in. Now the question is where can I fit in more of these trees - they're a great early fruit and I absolutely love them.

This winter I might have to buy some cherry root stocks and graft my own trees. Does anyone else grow cherry trees?