Cherry Picking 2017

Cherries are our hands-down favorite of the various pick-your-own fruits that we do each year. One big reason is the place that we go. We head up to Levering Orchard each year and the cherries, trees, and views are spectacular every time we go. The kids love climbing the ladders and it's great because as they are getting older, they're able to pick more on their own. Of course, Emma and Irene still ate far more than they picked, but that's to be expected. It didn't stop them from climbing the ladders, tho. :)

This was our 4th time going (we skipped last year for various reasons) and we picked about 28 lbs of cherries. Olivia then pitted them so that I could can most of them. Surprisingly, we still have canned cherries from our last visit in 2015, so this time, I froze about 10 lbs for smoothies and such.

Cherry Picking

I don't think we've made any secret of the fact that we love to do the pick-your-own stuff for just about every fruit we can. Last year, we discovered that cherries were a fun one to do and the location in the Virginia mountains was just about as pretty a place as you can find. We went back to Levering Orchard in Cana, VA again only to find that they had a tough spring and so their sweet cherry crop was only about 25% of what it should be. That made finding cherries a challenge. Last year, we were able to pick a large portion of our haul from the ground, but this year, it was all we could do to get 25 lbs, even climbing to the very tops of the ladders. We had to do quite a bit of moving the ladders to reach as many as we could.

Emma did a good job of finding the ones that we accidentally dropped. They didn't make it to the bucket, but she found them.

 

 Ezra has no fear and immediately climbed to the top of the highest ladder 20+ feet off the ground.

Gabe really got into it, too.

 

At one point, Olivia forewent the ladder altogether and parked herself amongst a particularly plentiful group of branches. Notice she didn't have a bucket... oh well, I guess eating them is part of the fun.

 

It was a particularly beautiful day.

 

 

While there weren't many, there were enough for us.

 

 

Even with all they ate in the trees, they still wanted their picnic lunch before we left.

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