Summertime Activities - Cherries, Berries, and Weddings

With an upcoming family wedding for which to prepare, the past week has been busy. Wedding preparations have included making and freezing cake pops and learning how to make flower crowns for the bridesmaids. This has been a wonderful year so far for weddings. We have been invited to four weddings between April and July.  We have one more special wedding to go and then our 2023 wedding season will draw to a close.

The Fourth of July was nice and warm. We had a lovely time with family and friends.

Outside of that, I have spent my free time this past week preserving cherries, picking serviceberries, drying herbs, and tending to the garden.


Serviceberries - The serviceberries are ripening, so I have been picking every day or two for the last week.  They do not all ripen at once and since the birds love them as much as we do, I try to pick what I can when I can before the birds eat them all. The first day I picked I probably only got three cups. As the season has worn on, there have been more and more ripe berries on the bushes at a time. The last time I picked, I had help and three of us ended up picking more than 8 cups. Each day I pick, I clean the berries and put them in the freezer to save for use at a later time. Most of the berries we pick this year will be used for jam or syrup, but I am planning to dry a few and use a few in a baking recipe - perhaps serviceberry muffins...

I have a short article about serviceberries up on the website. Click here to read it.


Cherries  - We have been gifted with fresh cherries from various friends in the past week, so fresh cherries have been on the snack menu!  Many people can cherries, but since I am not a fan of the mushy texture, I refrain from using cherries in this manner. This year, since we had more than we could quickly eat, I tried a new-to-me method of preserving them - rum soaked cherries!  After reading through a few recipes online, I opted to not use water and simply soaked the cherries in spiced rum with a little sugar and vanilla added in.  I look forward to tasting them in a few months.

Stevia and Lemon Verbena - Both of these were finally big enough to pick and dry.  We didn't get a lot to dry, but I look forward to including them in our tea recipes.

We are headed for warm weather in the next few weeks.  Stay cool, everyone!

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