First Fruity Fun of the Year

On the way back from a walk in the New Forest a couple of weeks ago, I  spied a big roadside Cherry tree laden down with scarlet fruit. I made a mental note that the fruit was plentiful and nearly ripe. We revisited the tree a week later and found a few more plus a couple of nice little Walnut trees in the same location.

This triggered a reminder to visit our favourite trees that we always pick locally. The Children were armed to the teeth with containers and pickers as we marched over Cobden Bridge to St Deny's.

The first tree initially looked fantastic and my son was soon up in the branches, however, not many of the red Cherries were fully ripe. We decided that waiting another week would be best.

We trotted around the corner to some other trees that we know and were greeted by a tremendous treefull of super ripe, sweet, black fruit, which we set about harvesting as quickly as we could.

My daughter seemed to be scoffing more fruit into her mouth than into the punnets, I warned her about tummy-ache but could not grumble too much. If it wasn't fun, the children would not enjoy coming, and this was the first fruit picking expedition of the year, always an exciting time.

Despite my daughter's best efforts, we still managed to return to base camp with 4.5 Kilograms of big fat cherries. More than enough to keep us all happy for a while and plenty to make into some delicious cakes or puddings.

A quick check on the Tesco website prices cherries at at least £2.00 per 200g, even more for organic fruit, which I'm quite sure ours was. This little hoard took us about half an hour to gather and there is still a great more than that waiting for us next week.