It's the Pits!

Go to the ant, O sluggard, observe her ways and be wise, which, having no chief, office or ruler, prepares her food in the summer and gathers her provision in the harvest. Proverbs 6:6-8

Yep, it's the pits! These are pits from the cherries I put up in the freezer last night. I discovered this nifty little tool that actually pops the pits right out of the cherries. It truly made play of my work!

Okay, so what gives, I'm a quilter not a farmer. Ah, but I'm trying to return to some domestic roots...it's been a while to say the least...

Years ago when the boys were little and we lived in Tennessee there was an old farmer that went to our church, Charlie Oliver. I mean a real farmer. He had over 100 acres right on the river and grew just about everything including hogs and tobacco (stories for another time). Well, for some reason Charlie loved me like a daughter and was so good to me and my family, always providing me with produce (or pork tenderloin) and later actually loaning me an acre of his land to try my hand at gardening...that's the year I canned so many green beans that once they were all eaten I haven't eaten another one! seriously! Oh and Charlie had a blackberry grove (orchard?) and I dearly dearly love blackberries! My grandmother used to have blackberry bushes in her yard and she's always put them up in the freezer so I could enjoy blackberries year round at her house. Of course, fresh off the vine was a wonderful option too.

Okay...so what about the pits above? Well yesterday in my effort to actually follow through with my new goals of eating healthy a friend of mine shared with me the location of a local farm and produce stand in Alvin, about 20 miles from my home. I came home with all sorts of wonders.



The strawberries are grown there on the farm. I washed them and then put them in a mini muffin pan to quick freeze before bagging them.


Don't know why I can't get this photo to turn 90 degrees the way I took it, but here you see the home grown blackberries. The other fruits aren't local but available at this farmer's market. Blueberries, raspberries and cherries. I did a google search on cherries last night and I'm convinced that I need to buy a truck load of them! The health benefits far out weight the expense! Oh, and the watermelon was home grown too. I loved their brown bags -- this is my friend Annette...

I think I'm going to have to frequent this place a lot this summer!

So this is how my little freezer looked last night and this is how it looks this morning. Love the new plastic 'mason jars'. In case you are wondering, I want to be able to just pick out one or two berries and not have them all clumped together, so that's why the quick freeze as single units before moving to the long term storage containers.

Okay, so the Ben & Jerry's is from my former life (grin) before I decided we needed to get healthy! Notice the replacement Soy Dream Cream in the back (double grin).

The majority of the fruit will be made into fruit smoothies which I'm finding is a wonderful way to start my day! And yes, I'll be in the pits again this morning as I do have another bag of cherries to de-pit and stock away. I'm trying to keep the ratio low of "pit two (or three) eat one!"