Honestly, a Cornelian cherry pie is the best cherry pie in the world. With vanilla ice cream, it's out of this world. I think of this fruit as the rhubarb of the "cherry" world. The taste is quite distinct and definitely not cranberry. Once you add sugar, the fruit is transformed. To make pie filling, I add sugar, red wine, a bit of lemon juice, touch of salt, ground black pepper, and some ground cloves. I use a bit of flour for thickener. People are skeptical when I extol the virtues of this pie, but once they've tried it, they're believers. Cornus mas is a huge seller in the Caucasus and Turkey, where it's routinely turned into jam (pits left in the fruit) and used to sweeten tea, especially when you have a cold or flu. It's a pain to pit it; a cherry pitter really doesn't do the job. I was in Tbilisi when I discovered the cherries years ago and pitted them while I watched the Clinton impeachment proceedings on television. I used a paperclip (and still do) to preserve as much of the whole, soft, very ripe fruit as I could. A friend in the Caucasus gently rolls the cherries over a grater to get the fruit off (she don't make pies with it; mine was the first she tried). Occasionally, for pie, I have a "pitting party": invite seven friends over, and in one hour, you will have the amount of pitted cherries it would have taken you eight hours to pit by yourself. As a reward, all pitters get a piece of pie. I boil the leftover pits to remove the clinging bits of fruit, which results in a strong Cornelian cherry juice that I turn into sorbet, using the same ingredients (sans flour) I use for the pie filling. A friend from New York told me I could make a fortune selling the sorbet there. (Sure, if someone invents a pitter.) The fruit also makes a wonderful sauce--delicious on chicken or ice cream or on anything else you would flavor with cherry. This cherry would make an excellent liqueur, I think.

I hope to see a few cherries here on a small tree I planted last year. Its the sour cherry, montmorency type. Almost didn't come out of dormency until mid July, when it finally started to branch out and get more leaves. My dad was partial to bing cherries and right now, they do sell them, but they come from Chili. He decided to stew some in booze. He filled a jar with the bings and poured in some VO whiskey. They are still in my fridge and have remained there for well over 20 years now. No signs of any spoilage, and I would expect them to be quite mellow by now. Bings are nice for fresh eating, but not as well suited for canning or pie making, because they don't hold up as well as sour types.

Carol, We are tilling less in general but it is a really hard habit to break. I love my Mantis. I only use it in raised beds that have well-amended soil or in the band of sandy soil outside the garden. If we have hard ground outside the garden to till, or want to till the grade-level ground in the garden, Tim gets out the big Troy-Bilt tiller, which is more tiller and more power than I can handle. The last time I tried to use the TB by myself, I was no match for it and the tiller and I just about took out the garden fence. I have left the heavy-duty rototilling for Tim to do ever since that day. In my part of the state, I could watch the storm clouds build to our west and southwest yesterday. Then they would head our way, go slightly south/southeast of us and begin moving north and northeast. On the far northern and northeastern sides of the county, you could sometimes see them circling back north/northwest. Everyone was watching the sky because it was so odd. After a wave of clouds would come through, we'd have a little sunlight and blue sky and could watch another round of storms build out west and southwest and head our way. That cycle went on throughout most of the day. Once this low pressure system gets on out of here, the coming high pressure system ought to give us a warm, sunny weekend and I'm looking forward to that. I hope the heat and sunshine will dry up some of the mud and muck. Jay, Lake Texoma rose over a foot in the first day or two after all the rain fell earlier in the week. It takes a whole lot of runoff to make a lake that size rise a foot. I'm not surprised your mulch didn't decompose much last year. Mine didn't either, and in many places this spring, I had a good layer of dry mulch on the beds that hardy decomposed at all. By the time it began raining here in the fall, I guess the temperatures were so low that the mulch didn't break down. It is rare that the winter rains don't finish off whatever is left of my mulch from the previous year. I hope you had productive time in the lean-to. I'm embarassed to admit how much time I spend puttering around in the greenhouse, even when I could be out in the yard working. It is always warm and nicely humid and the only wind is what is coming in open doors and vents so I can control the wind to some extent. Once I get the plants out of the GH and into the ground, I could put a lawn chair and a little table in there, and sit in my warm, muggy greenhouse and read and relax. However, that's unlikely to happen. At our house, the cats are the only ones who use the lawn furniture. If we're outside, we're too busy doing stuff to sit down. Dawn

"neon HFCS death balls". ROFLMAO They aren't healthy but I happen to like maraschino cherries, even the "neon death balls" type. Readinglady sent me a jar of home canned maraschinos, though, and they were a different species altogether. Now THOSE were good, and I don't think they had any booze in them at all. Michael/Lyra, I saw signs for pick your own raspberries this weekend, now I just have to find a couple of hours between finishing my house painting, tilling the garden, fixing fence so my "rental bull" doesn't escape, taking care of stepmom's finances and this full time job that supports my bad farming habit. (grin) I'd sure love to make some raspberry jam, though... Annie