Cherries, Apples and Chick Update

There is no other way to say it; the cherries were a lot of work.  For nearly three weeks we picked, dried and froze for hours, gathering well over 100 pounds of cherries.  Our trees were remarkably prolific and it's been fun to think of all the uses we can have for the cherries. The dried ones are a great addition to cereal and the frozen ones will go very well in ice cream and such.  Despite being so pleased with the cherry crop, when we picked the last one, we were pretty excited.

Our last haul:  you can see how dark most of them are.

One thing that made our cherry processing much easier was our deluxe pitter from Germany.  Many pitters require you place a cherry in a punch or vice-like set up one at a time.  With the amount of fruit we had, this would have taken forever.  So thankfully we invested in a Leifheit Kirschentkerner, which promised it could pit 12 kilos of cherries per hour using its spring activated handle. Not to be a pitch-man, but it was awesome!  

Put the cherries in the hopper, push down on the handle and a metal plunder went through the cherry and...

the fruit rolled happily down the ramp while the pit went in to the clear container. 

Now that we are done with the cherries, we are looking forward to our other fruit trees.  They are all doing great and we are looking forward to a big harvest.

Apples everywhere!

The red delicious already have a nice blush to them.

This is our mystery: this tree never fruited before while we owned it. 
We think they are plums.  Any other guesses?

The pears were some of the first fruit to start in the spring and are pretty large by now.

Finally, our chick is a bit over a month old now.  It is doing very well and seems healthy.  It has developed more mature-looking white feathers, though some yellow chick fuzz is still on its head.  It has also taken to grown up things well:  eating and drinking from the feeders, roosting at night and running around the property with the hens.  It still sticks close to mom hen but you can tell that the gap between it and the hen is widening as it grows up.  It is pretty skittish so the pictures were taken a bit far away, but you can tell the size and color pretty well. It's so cool to watch it grow and know it came from our chickens and one of those eggs.

Taking a quick break with mom and "aunt."

Zoom, there is goes, heading for cover!

A good size comparison:  like a chicken-shaped magpie or so now.