Tuesday, June 11

Alternative Harvest: When to Cut Your Cherries

Yes, you read that right. To harvest my first tart cherries of the year, I used a novel tool:


When would you want to use a garden scissors to harvest your cherries?  Well, there are actually a few drawbacks to its use, so I would really only recommend it when you have to deal with this: 

Look closely, top center. There's a telltale tangle of twigs...

Mama Robin (I think) is hanging out in the nest that you can barely see above, while Papa Robin visits intermittently. He will "yell" at me incessantly - usually from the safety of a nearby wire - if I'm hanging out near the tree when he arrives, but she prefers to ignore me as long as I don't get too close. Or shake the tree.

That last thing is the reason for the scissors. When I harvested the first few cherries, she rose up out of the nest and squawked at me in a high-pitched tone that I think made me just as distressed as she seemed to be. I beat a quick and hasty retreat.

Today I grabbed the scissors and took them outside with me, thinking that I might be able to at least get a handful or so of cherries before I upset Mama. Surprisingly, she didn't seem to care one bit about my presence, just so long as I was cutting instead of pulling and rustling. So I'm thinking that I will need to continue my harvesting-with-scissors approach for the rest of this season. It seems like a win-win to me!

6 comments:

Lisa at Greenbow said...

I guess you don't seem so violent when you use scissors. Sweet story. I hope you both are happy with the harvest. Yummmmm those cherries look so good. Off your own tree too. WOW I am impressed.

Kris Peterson said...

I'm glad you found a peaceable way to share your space with the robins. At least they're not stealing your cherries. I wonder if a pair of robins could keep the squirrels away from the fruit in my yard...

greggo said...

I can taste the pie now.

Unknown said...

Kris, I highly suggest trying it, if you can recruit them! I didn't get any of the cherries on my other tree last year--I think that the robins HAVE to get the credit for this. :-)

Greenbow Lisa, hahaha. I was safe with the scissors. No running!

Greggo, I can, too... almost. I keep running out of time to make pie crust, so we've had 3 different versions of cherry crisp so far instead. I'm almost on my last harvest, so I'm going to have to make time for pie crust tomorrow or Thursday!

Sophia said...

WOW! Great job! I almost forgot when was the last time I have ate pie. Thanks to this great idea, I wanna try to make one now.

Stratoz said...

Kim, how cool that you have cherries, let alone how you figured out to harvest them without being squawked at.

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