Have your cherry and eat it

Yum yum yum

Last year  as we walked through the garden in winter Seamus and I stopped at a cherry tree that was the most miserable specimen in the garden. Lanky and fruitless it has been on a charity scholarship for far too long, Seamus wanted to take it out and replace it with a more productive variety, I pleaded for a final years clemency-if it didn't produce this summer it was all over. Just for good measure we told the tree directly-cough up a few cherrys or your'e out!

Much like the fruitless tree in the bible its amazing what direct threats can do. I'm not going to tell you it grew four feet in all directions but it did put on a fine healthy crop of leaves, a flourish of blossoms and finally 4 fruit. Yes 4! Four delicious fresh sweet cherries. I ate two, Seamus ate one and a bird got the final one.

Thats not the end of the cherries though. We have five other cherry trees one of which has a fine crop of morello cherries, these are the ones you cook rather than eat. I had a ripe one the other day and Jesus it was so bitter would give sloes a good run for their money.(Three of the five trees are newcomers since last winter and the other dropped all its fruit in the late frosts, the fecking weather has not been good for fruit this year.)

Morello cherries

Anyway the whole point of my meanderings is to explain one strange thing-we actually got to eat cherries for the first time and the bitter cherries, usually decimated by the birds are, as yet, untouched. Likewise over-ripe blackcurrants are bursting on the bushes and there has been no raid. Why? Is there an abundance of food in nature for them as some people have sugested? or did catching one unlucky blackbird a few weeks ago really put the others off their fruit?