This evening, I headed over to pick some chokecherries.

When I got there, I found far fewer than I expected to!

The birds are well fed. 😀

Which works out.  They eat the stuff I can’t reach, and I pick the stuff they have a harder time getting to.

The chokecherry trees along the north fence line are in between lilacs.  As I came closer, I couldn’t help but notice a lot of white powder all over their leaves.

It’s dust from cars going by on the gravel road!  This is what falls on the leaves on the south side of the bushes – the north side much be just covered!

It made for some rather dusty berries, too.

This is all I got from the two trees along the north fence line, and even a bit from the one tree by my mother’s raspberry bushes, on the south side of the garden area.

After giving them a couple of rinses in the bucket, I cleaned out the leaves, twigs and stems, then gave them a couple more washes.

As I write this, they are soaking in our ice cold well water to get the last of the floaty bits off.

Tomorrow, I will go over the recipes I found and decide what to do with them.  After I measure how much I have.  Definitely small batch preserving on this one.

I found this link with several recipes for different methods of chokecherry preserves.  It calls for 10 cups of chokecherries to make a juice, which is then used in most of the other recipes.  I definitely don’t have 10 cups.   I do have enough for the chokecherry vinegar recipe, though.  In fact, I could start that tonight and finish it tomorrow night.

I think that’s what I will do. 😀

The Re-Farmer