Cherries from the Yard, and Pie for the Fourth of July
There is a cherry tree in my yard that had its best year yet. It is a Montmorency, the classic tart pie cherry, and this summer it loaded itself up with fruit until the branches were bending under the weight of it. Some years this tree does fine, and some years it barely bothers. This year it went all out. Every branch you look at is dotted with bright red cherries, right up into the top branches where the birds usually beat me to them.
If you have never grown one, the Montmorency is worth knowing about. It is an old French variety, named for the Montmorency valley north of Paris, and it has been the standard sour cherry in North America for generations. When you think of Door County cherries here in Wisconsin, or the cherry orchards over in Michigan, this is very often the cherry they mean. It is not a sweet cherry you eat off the tree by the handful. Bite into one raw and it will pucker your whole face. It is a cooking cherry, bred for the pie plate and the jam jar, and it is fantastic at that job.
A few things make it a good tree for a yard like mine. It is self-fertile, so you only need the one tree to get a crop. It is genuinely cold hardy, which is why it does so well this far north where a lot of sweet cherries would sulk or freeze out. And it does not ask for much once it is established. The cherries come ripe early in the summer, right around the end of June and into the first week of July, which is how a tree in my yard ends up being the reason there is pie on the table for the Fourth.
My dad did the picking this year, which is not a small job on a tree this full, and then came the part nobody fights over: the pitting. Anyone who has pitted a few pounds of cherries by hand knows exactly what I mean. Red fingers, a growing bowl of pits, and a smaller bowl of actual cherries at the end of it than you would think. It is worth every minute once you see what it turns into.
My mom took those cherries and made pie. Gluten free, with a nut crust and a nut crumble over the top instead of the usual pastry lid, so the whole thing comes out of the oven golden and toasted on top with the deep red cherry filling bubbling up around the edges. She made two of them for our Fourth of July, and I can tell you they did not stick around long.
There is something about eating a pie that started as a tree in your own yard. The cherries did not come from a store or a can. They grew right there in the yard, not far from where we sat and ate them. My dad picked them, my mom baked them, and the whole family sat around on the Fourth and finished them off. That is about as good as summer gets around here.
