Cherries and plums

Today was forecast be be absolutely dreadful, there had been large and heavy rain storms due, mainly down south, but expected up here overnight and today, so I have crammed all my gardening jobs in to earlier in the week to all myself to stay at home today. I assume planning on making something with all the cherries I picked and stoned on Monday.

I had decided to even clean the stones and use them to make pretty heat bags, ones where the stones  are sewn into a pretty cotton bag and then you can just warm them in the microwave for a short while and use them like a hot water bottle. However, it's proving difficult to remove all the fruit from the stones and having researched on the Internet, it would seem the only way is lots of washing, rubbing, rinsing and effort, so a bit undecided on this.

Cherries are also really low in pectin and acid, so it's hard to get a good set with them, I've seen a recipe for a dark cherry conserve, which uses redcurrant juice as a base to give more acidity and help with the set, so I thought I could probably melt some of the cranberry and redcurrant jelly I made a couple of weeks ago and use that.

I also have about 1.5 litres of juice, left over from stoning the cherries and a bit of amaretto syrup from bottling some of them and I'm thinking of some sort of syrup or sauce, still undecided.

I picked plums yesterday too from our little dark plum tree, I managed to get the majority before wasps took a liking and need to stone these and then either make chutney or freeze them. We have several Victoria trees, and I make jam with those, but these little dark plums are just a bit too sharp for jam.