Eating Floyd: Playing Catch-Up (and a cherry update)

The spring canning classes were finally over last Tuesday and Shana, Cathy, and I heaved a huge sigh of relief.  Don't get me wrong, we immensely enjoyed teaching them, but the responsibility was driven home to us of how important it is to purvey information clearly and succinctly so the students know how to preserve safely. We had a great turnout of really nice people truly interested in taking control not only of what's in their pantries but what's in the stuff that's in their pantries.  We'll be offering one more canning class around the beginning of September before hunting season starts, focusing on canning meat and stock.  In the meantime we're doing a post-mortem on the classes we've done so we can offer better classes in the future.  We eventually want to offer classes on freezing, dehydrating, root cellaring, and stocking the pantry: how to determine what kind of produce, how much to plant or buy in, and how much to preserve to get through the year.

Today's Harvest 6-12-12

Preserving Floyd: Cherries 4 ways

Yesterday I finished preserving the 20 lbs of cherries Michael and I picked last weekend.  We immediately loaded the dehydrator from top to bottom which yielded 6 cups of dried cherries.  I'm not sure how much fresh weight we put in, we just loaded all 9 screens full of pitted cherries.  Dehydrating cherries is easy: wash, pit, place on screen.  Dehydrate at 135F for approximately 8 hours.

I then proceeded to pit the rest of the cherries in preparation for preserving.  Since I'm not doing anything this year that requires pretty whole pitted cherries, I opted for speed and just tore the cherries open far enough to pop the seed out.  Unless you wear gloves (and I don't) you might as well be resigned to the fact that your hands and nails are gonna stain and look gnarly for a day or two.  I ended up with two gallon jars of pitted cherries.

With the pitted cherries I made Black Forest Preserves, Cherry Vanilla Pie Filling, and Smokey Chipotle Cherries.

Gardening Floyd: The Cherries Are In!

The sweet cherries are in and ready to pick at Levering Orchard.  As far as I know, Levering’s is the nearest pick-your-own cherry orchard to Floyd.

Michael and I went picking yesterday.  The trees are loaded!  We picked 20 lbs in about an hour or so (a little over a 3 liquid gallon bucket full) from the ground reaching into the trees.  There are ladders into the trees and staff to move and set them as you wish if you’re into climbing.  Cherries were $2.50/lb at the orchard as compared with $6/lb at the market yesterday.  Hours are: Monday thru Saturday 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.  Sunday: 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

If you go, wear comfortable clothes for bending and stretching, good supportive shoes with traction, sun screen/bug repellent (although the bugs weren’t bad yesterday), hat/bandana, and maybe a raincoat.  Take along a water bottle too.

To get there:  Go south on the Blue Ridge Parkway to just past milepost 193.  Turn left on to Orchard Gap Road.  Rap’s Convenience Store is right there on the corner.  Drive approximately 2 miles down the mountain.  Take your time, the road winds and is steep!  You’ll see the large sign for the turn off to the orchard on your right.  It took us about 45 minutes to get there from Floyd.  Maybe not that long.

On my cherry preserving list:

Dehydrated cherries (currently in the dehydrator)

Cherry Pie Filling

Cherry Jam

Boozy Cherries

Black Forest Preserves

I'll be preserving these over the next week and will have recipes and photos.