Harvest Time

Our cherry and pear trees are producing bumper crops this year; they seem to do especially well every other year, as if to say that producing heavily is so exhausting they need a year hiatus between stellar crops. They're both fairly old trees, so it's entirely possible, I guess.

With the cherries, we usually leave the crown of the tree to the birds and pick our cherries from the lower and middle branches. There's plenty to go around, although I'm not crazy about the purple splats the birds leave on everything within a one hundred foot radius of the tree.

Fortunately the pear and cherry trees don't ripen at the same time. It would be a full time job dealing with all that fruit. I still have pears we canned summer before last. We'll have to start pushing them on friends and relatives to make room for the new batch.

When the pears are ripe it's worth your life to walk under the tree. They get big enough to at least give you a decent concussion when they fall. Once they've fallen, we have to get out and pick them up immediately because Cooper's developed a taste for pears and will take a bite out of each one before choosing a favorite to race around the yard with. At least they don't have the same effect on him that banana has on Jake.