June has been a great month and like most months – filled with a variety of interesting activities. My work schedule has been varied with the first part of the month still quite busy, but then things started to taper off towards the mid-end of the month. Here’s a quick recap of some of the more memorable things that happened.

1. Spring BBQ
My second annual spring BBQ got kicked off was a great way to kick off the summer. We had great weather, good food, cold beer (well it needed a bit of time to chill first), and most importantly good times with friends. I made some burgers (thanks to Costco =P), but also whipped up a grilled pineapple marinated with rum, brown sugar, cinnamon, and vanilla. Still warm and dripping with juice from the grill, this was a delicious finish to some of the other grilled food from the day. I think I’ll be making this again in the future.

2. A Cottage Weekend
For one of my weekends in June, I had the chance to spend it up at a friend’s cottage. It was a nice escape from the city, and I had the chance to do lots of open water swimming, catch up on some summer reading, and enjoy good food and time in nature.

3. Cherries
June was a month full of cherries. I picked cherries from 4 different trees, and probably came away with over 150lbs of cherries. Many of the cherries went towards our CSA participants, however the bulk of the cherries came from the tree in my backyard. It was definitely a bumper crop year, with the cherries seeming to be never ending. In fact, there is probably still another 20 or so lbs of cherries still on my tree waiting to be picked before they go overripe.

I think 3 of the tree were of the sweet bing variety, while the other tree was also a sweet cherry, but the fruit was not as large and not as sweet. Despite many similarities, each tree had several unique characteristics. For example, one tree had extremely flexible branches, meaning that you could literally pull the branch towards you so that you could reach the cherries at the outer reaches of the branches. Other trees had much more rigid branches, making it much more difficult to reach some of the cherries. For some trees, the growth of the cherries occurred mainly on the smaller branches, while other trees like my tree had cherries growing not only from the smaller outer granches, but also from larger branches. Finally, some of the cherries came in large clumps (8 or more per clump) on the branches while other trees had fewer berries per clump (but more spread out .

For the cherries from my tree, unfortunately because of the heavy rain we had the past week, this caused the cherries to really swell in size and burst their skins. While they are still great to eat, this means that they are more susceptible to go bad (since the skin isn’t intact) and that they aren’t as sweet (due to all the excess water). From these cherries, many of them have been eaten and picked by friends and family, many are now in my freezer awaiting some future use, some of the them have been juiced, some have been turned into juice, while still more have been juiced and are now fermenting in another experiement of mine to create some cherry wine. We’ll see the results of what of this are in about a year (yes it takes a while to age, but the majority of the work has been done already).

4. Garden update
I thought I’d take a couple paragraphs about the status of my personal garden. This year, I’m experimenting with a variety of new plants. I put in tomatillos, kale, lemon balm, arugula, lots of tomatoes, a hungarian sweet wax pepper, purple beas, beans, a couple kinds of basil, cantaloupe, and still lots more. Here are some pics of things are looking like

Overall June was a good month. July I think will be a bit of a transition month, but I’m sure lots more interesting things will come from another 31 days.