The Tool That Saved My Cherry Harvest

Our cherry tree took four years to give us anything worth talking about. It's a sweet cherry my husband Dan planted the spring we moved in, and for three summers it gave us maybe a double handful of fruit, just enough for the birds to argue over before we got out there. Last June it finally did something. I walked out one morning before a twelve hour shift and the whole thing was hanging heavy with dark red cherries, more than I'd ever seen on it, more than I honestly knew what to do with.

I picked that first batch in about twenty minutes, a little over four pounds, and I was thrilled right up until I sat down at the kitchen table that night to actually deal with them. I didn't own a cherry pitter. I'd never needed one before. So I grabbed a paring knife, cut around each pit, twisted, and dug it out with my thumbnail, one cherry at a time, the way my grandmother used to do it standing at her sink in Ohio.

Forty five minutes later I had maybe half the bowl done and my hands looked like I'd lost a fight. Dark red under every nail, a sting where the knife had slipped twice, juice dripping down my wrist onto my scrub pants I hadn't bothered to change out of. My daughter Ruthie, who's seven, came in wanting to help and I had to tell her no because I was handling a knife over a bowl of slippery fruit and I did not need her fingers anywhere near mine right then.

That was the moment I almost gave up on the whole harvest. I remember thinking, if this is what it takes every single time this tree fruits, I'm better off letting the birds have it and buying cherries at the store like a normal person. I love growing our own food, I love knowing exactly what went into it, but I work three twelve hour shifts a week and I don't have forty five minutes to lose to half a bowl of fruit.

I stopped, wiped my hands on a dish towel that would never be the same color again, and looked up cherry pitters on my phone right there at the table. I wasn't picky. I found the EddHomes 7-in-1, a small handheld thing barely bigger than my palm, twelve and a half dollars, over two thousand reviews, and a rating that told me other people weren't just imagining it worked. I ordered it that night, more out of desperation than confidence.

The tree gave us the best year it ever had, and for one whole night I thought that was going to be the problem instead of the gift.

It arrived four days later, right as the tree was dropping its second big wave of fruit. I sat down with a colander of cherries and the little EddHomes pitter and honestly expected to be disappointed, because that's how it usually goes with cheap kitchen gadgets in my house. I dropped a cherry into the cradle, squeezed the handle, and the pit popped straight out into the bowl below. No knife, no thumbnail, no stain creeping under my nails. I did the next one, then the next, and somewhere around cherry number twenty I realized I was actually enjoying it.

A full four pound batch that had cost me forty five brutal minutes the week before took just under fifteen this time, and that includes stopping twice to rinse pit juice out of the little catch tray. Ruthie sat next to me at the table this round, dropping cherries into the cradle while I squeezed, because there was nothing sharp for her to worry about. That's a small thing, but it's the kind of small thing that made this feel like a summer project again instead of a punishment for having a productive tree.

We ended up putting up nine pints of cherry preserves that first week, plus a bag in the freezer for smoothies and a cobbler Dan made on a Sunday that didn't survive the day. None of that would have happened if I'd stuck with the knife. I would have picked the fruit once, gotten discouraged, and let the second and third waves rot on the branch or go straight to the birds, which is exactly what almost happened before that little tool showed up.

The EddHomes has been sitting in the utensil crock by my stove ever since, not buried in a drawer, because cherry season isn't the only thing it's good for. I've used it on olives for a tapenade and on a bag of frozen sour cherries for a pie filling in the middle of winter. It's held up fine through the dishwasher every time, no rust, no cracked plastic, nothing bent out of shape.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

If you were sitting across from me right now, I'd tell you this isn't some miracle gadget, it's a small plastic and metal squeeze tool that does exactly one job. But that one job was the difference between a tree that finally produced and a harvest I almost walked away from out of pure exhaustion. If you've got a cherry tree that's about to have its best year, or you're staring down a farmers market flat of cherries you want to put up before they turn, don't do what I did the first time. Save your thumbnail and your evening. A twelve dollar tool shouldn't matter this much, but this one did.