It’s cherry picking time on the farm. Our pie cherry tree was loaded this year!

The first step was to pick the cherries. Since our tree is a dwarf cherry tree, it was easy to stand on the ground and reach all the cherries. We’ve had three pickings so far, with at least one more.

Once we got the cherries inside, we washed them well and started to take the pits or stones out. This can be a log tedious process. It definitely helps to have many children! I just put in a new Adventures in Odyssey Cd for them to listen too and they worked very diligently! (Learned that trick from my mom!)

It is a rather messy job and there was cherry juice all over the table.

The first year I had cherries I just used a knife and cut out each stone. Not good. It was a BIG mess and took lots of time. Then we found three little hand stoner’s. You manually put each cherry in and push the handle which sends the rod into cherry pushing out the stone. Definitely an improvement over the knife, but it was still time consuming.

Then we discovered the mechanical cherry stoner. You could fill the hopper and just keep hitting the plunger as gravity pulls the cherry into position. What an amazing invention!

I picked mine up on clearance last fall and it definitely paid for itself this week! This one is a cheaper version and it needed a little “help” at times to position the cherries or make sure they release. I’m not sure if a more expensive version would have the same hang-ups. This one worked for us and our one little dwarf cherry tree just fine.

We actually did a little experiment and discovered that by using the hand stoner it took about 5 seconds per cherry, but with the mechanical stoner it was only 2 seconds. Hey, time is money!

Once the cherries were stoned, we put them in zip lock bags, dated them and put them in the freezer. They will make wonderful cherry pies, cobblers, and crisps all winter. If you’d like one of our favorite cherry recipes, check out my other blog The Chocolate Lady Dishes.