Two weekends ago, my sister Darlene (Blackford) and family came over to the ranch to pick apples from the orchard and to hunt up and pick chokecherries. The main purpose was to give granddaughter Sagan the “picking experience,” an annual activity when growing up on the ranch.

The trees in the orchard produce red and yellow apples and plums. As with all fruit, the crop varies, depending on the spring frosts, and then in the late summer the birds, especially crows, enjoy the fruit so it has to be picked at just the right time.

Our brother, Duane (Osborn), who lives on the ranch, had a ladder ready so that Darlene’s family could pick the best apples, always at the top of the tree. Many happy hours have been spent by my siblings and me and then with our children and grandchildren, picking fruit there and feeding bruised apples to the cows in the pasture.

Then it was down to the hay meadows area to find chokecherries. Up at Morapos, chokecherry, serviceberry and currant bushes are abundant, growing along the driveway, behind the house and in grove-like areas all around the hay meadows. The currants are most scarce (also my favorite) and serviceberries are perhaps most plentiful — but Mom claimed that they were bland so she never used them when making jelly.

Chokecherries are probably the most sought-after berries, so much so that people from Craig drive to more rural areas to find them. Whether or not there are any berries depends on the frost, and since birds devour them, even before the berries are really ripe, pickers have to get them at the right time. This year there weren’t any berries on the trees that line the driveway, but Darlene and family found some in the trees around the hay meadow.

I wasn’t along for the chokecherry picking this year, but I remember it well. (We even have a few chokecherry bushes here at Pipi’s Pasture.) As kids we gathered up buckets and Mom accompanied us to pick the berries. I don’t think we took a ladder along because the vegetation around the trees was so thick that we couldn’t have stood it up. We pulled down the branches (but took care not to break them as Mom frowned on it) and stripped the berries from the branches. Our hands and arms were red and sticky.

Birds flew around above us, probably concerned that we were taking their food. When we had picked all the berries we could reach, we moved to another bush. Another thing we learned from Mom was to always leave a few berries on the bushes, “for seed.”

During years when the chokecherries were plentiful, Mom canned the juice so that she had some for jelly and syrup the next year if needed. Each spring we held our breaths, hoping the frost wouldn’t “get” the blossoms on all of the fruit trees.