Foraging from local fruit trees and step by step honey extraction

This week we have been picking cherries from a cherry tree in the neighborhood. This is one of the things that is the best about being in a neighborhood. Everyone seems to want to have fruit trees in their yard, however they never pick the fruit. We regularly pick fruit from other people's trees (with their permission of course), and from trees owned by the government. We also pick grapes from an old couple's fence and make grape juice in the fall.

Finding this free fruit can be frustrating when you first move into an area. I have seen several websites that attempt to help people locate fruit, but we don't have one that we've found useful so far. The most fruitful (ha ha - we're so punny) source we've cultivated is word of mouth. Every time we talk about spending all our evenings for a week picking fruit, our listeners become more likely to remember us the next time they see a laden, unattended fruit tree. Every year, we get at least one notice from a friend: "Hey, I noticed that this old/renting/never home neighbor of mine has a fruit tree - they'd probably let you pick the fruit so they don't have to clean it off the ground." We ask and almost always get a yes. We clear up rotten fruit from the ground while we're working and usually offer the owners a percentage of what we pick (although no one has ever taken it), and people seem happy about it. Our second most effective method of getting fruit is to watch when we're walking and biking and note the positions of fruit trees. We ask their owners if they will pick the fruit themselves. This succeeds less often (a decent number of these people want their own fruit), but some of the people do let us pick and we get a new, nearby source.

We have processed about half the cherries we picked so far. We have three gallons of cherries frozen for smoothies next year. Mrs. True tries to get herself and the kids to drink a fruit-and-kefir smoothie every day for the probiotics, so it's useful to have lots of frozen fruit on hand.

To process cherries is super easy if you have a cherry pitter. Just wash them off and pit them. You can can them if you want to, but that is way more than we are willing to do, so we just freeze them. This is the cherry pitter than we use, and it is excellent (terms of functionality, storage space required, as well as in terms of price.)

We harvested honey again today. I took some pictures this time, so here they are:

These are the tools that we use to collect the honey: A big bowl, a knife to cut the comb off of the top bar, and a hive tool (a small crowbar for breaking into a bee's home)

Here is the hive unopened, but with the roof up. I don't know why there are rocks on it. I intend to ask my bee mentor some day.

Here are both sides of the comb that I selected to harvest. It is more capped off than the one from last week.

Here is the comb after I shooed all the bees off of it, and cut it off the top bar.

I mashed it with a potato masher.

Placing the comb in a 2 gallon bucket lined with a colander and plastic mesh cheesecloth.

A few hours later most of the honey has drained, and the comb is left over.

We don't pasturize our honey, so pretty much the next step is bottling it in glass jars.

Finally, I just decided to read Walden for the first time. It is quite a fun book. As I was talking about it with my brother in law, he said it sounded like I was just Thoreau reincarnated

So far my favorite part has been the following quote:

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it.

This is so true! Whenever I want to go to Easter Island, or Italy and can't because I have to work my daily job I wonder weather all the stuff that I have it worth it, or if a simpler life with  would be better and allow me to be happier.

Mrs. True liked his idea of voluntary simplicity:

I intend to build me a house which will surpass any on the main street in Concord in grandeur and luxury, as soon as it pleases me as much and will cost me no more than my present one.

Speaking of houses, our current house is great. We have, however had this idea of a dream house that we have talked about for years. It will be a small house on a few acres in the country. It will be banked into the earth like a hobbit hole, it will be by a stream and in a forest. There we will be able to grow food for ourselves and spend time together all the time.
Of course this dream house will probably have to wait till I'm retired, since it would involve being out in the country, but we are hoping that through thrift and economy we can retire before too long. Mrs. True will probably write a post our retirement plans before too long.

For anyone else who dreams of retiring in a hobbit hole, we discovered a company that sells hobbit holes. Here is the website. We thought that this was a really cool idea!