The Canadian Horticulturist. 247 



CHERRY CANNING. 



INHERE is probably no fruit which submits so well to the canning and 

 preserving processes as the cherry, which does not lose its delicious 

 flavor by cooking. The strawberry, of course, is best? raw, and is 

 in its greatest perfection when freshly picked and eaten at once. Still 

 there are many ways in which it can be cooked and preserved, and if 

 the result gives us something different from the fresh fruit in flavor, 

 it is yet very delicious. If you have never tried sun-preserving of 

 strawberries and cherries, it will pay you to experiment with it this year ; and, if 

 properly done, you will find it one of the most delicious ways of putting up these 

 fruits. It preserves them quite as effectually as cooking over the fire, and much 

 more delicately, for it gives none of the rankness which is apt to follow cooking 

 in a heavy syrup. The manner of preserving in the sun, is as follows : 



Stone the cherries and put them on platters or in flat dishes. To each pint of . 

 cherries put a scant pint of granulated sugar. Mix them well by putting in first the 

 pint of cherries and then sprinkling the sugar over. Let them stand over night 

 and by morning the sugar will have extracted much of the juice. If they seem 

 not to be very juicy in the morning set each platter in the oven, for a few min- 

 utes only, or on a warm place about the stove until the juice has come out freely. 

 Then set the platters in the sun — in the hottest place you can find — and put 

 either glass or some sort of very thin netting over them. In from a day and a 

 half to two days the syrup will thicken and the fruit will become semi-transparent. 

 Put cold into jars and close them, and the cherries are ready for winter use. No 

 heating is necessary ; but it is a little better to put into self-sealing jars than 

 into open ones, merely to keep the fruit from drying. Sun-preserved strawber- 

 ries are done in exacly the same manner, and is by far the best way to preserve 

 the flavor of the berry. 



For canning cherries the best way is to sweeten them but slightly, cook for 

 a few minutes, and then put them in air-tight jars. They are very easily kept, 

 and the flavor is retained better if only a little sugar is put in. When the cans 

 are opened in the winter they can be sweetened to taste. 



Grass Around Cherry Trees. — The American Cultivator says that the 

 cherry tree needs a dry soil, and if in grass the crop is none the worse, though 

 the grass should be kept low by pasturing or with the scythe, for convenience 

 in getting around among the trees to harvest the fruit. We have seen some 

 places where the cherry crop seemed to be injured by removal of the sod from 

 under the trees. The fruit was wormy and poor. It was not loss of fertility 

 that caused this difference, for a thin skimming of sod could not make the soil 

 much, if any, poorer. But it did make the soil around the trees much wetter 

 in early spring, and this probably is what injured the fruit. — O. Farmer. 



