Cherries

Someday I'll figure out how to make this blog be more interesting and sophisticated.  For now it seems to be a picture documentation of my day!  But I can't resist, because my family is so far, and it's fun to share with them what we do all day!

So to recap yesterday's events:

First I finished the soap pocket I had planned for the soap ends:

After that, we set to gather the first picking of sour cherries:

Everyone took a turn at pitting them, but the cherries are so small and soft that we missed many pits, and I was forever taking them out of the mix. I don't doubt we will still find some in our jam. :(  Needless to say, it got to be quite a messy job!

While we were making jam, Daddy and Simkha took a snooze on the porch.

The work was worth it-- we made 15 pints of sour cherry jam.  We have another picking or so, but don't have nearly as many cherries as the last two years.  I think we had fifteen gallons of cherries last year!  This year is more "normal"! 

Here is what we did on Thursday.  From this to this:

I saved the moving of the ping pong table for Dan.  He means to put it together and set it up in the root-cellar section of the basement, so I cleaned that up, too:

In the garage, we sorted out all the canning jars and tools.  Over here are the tools, the pints, and the wide mouth quarts:

And to the right of that are the narrow-mouth quarts and the mayonnaise jars:

Having them organized makes me look forward to more canning this summer.  It was chaos trying to find the right jar at the right time, and the right amount of lids and rims, etc.  How wonderful to be able to find what I need right away!

And this here was a little bonus-- now nobody can say they can't find a hoe or a shovel.  :D

And near the end of the day, Uriah brought in the fifty pound bag of rolled oats that I picked up from a local Amish store for only about $17.  We like our granola!

And Simkha helped get the oats into the oatmeal buckets.

And there is another documented day.  :)