Blueberries, Blackberries, Peaches...Oh my!

The fruit is finally starting to roll in.

As we all know the weather has been outrageously ridiculous this year! With the early warmth and the late frost that we got we were nervous about how fruit was going to be this year.

There were some reports that stated that 100% of the cherries in NY were destroyed, 100% of the peaches in NY were destroyed. Apples were scarce and many of the other fruits were going to be very minimal.

Of course the year that we get ready to launch a kitchen and try to go big with our fruit butters is the year that the fruit crop is damaged.

Well we immediately spoke with our Cornell Orchards people to see what was going on with their crop. As of 2 years ago that is where we were getting 90% of our fruit from. Speaking with them we found that we would not be able to get our peaches, plums or cherries from them. We would not receive our Paw-Paws and Kiwis that we normally get.

But they were going to start picking berries that they had never sold to us before. Blueberries, Black Raspberries, Red Raspberries, Blackberries and more.

We have had the Blueberries for a couple of weeks now as well as the black raspberries. The Red Raspberries and Blackberries we just got this week.  The blackberries are HUGE!!!

Hopefully next week we will be able to get the Doughnut Peaches that everyone loves so much. They just missed that last frost so we are lucky to be getting those!

Don't get me wrong, this season is still going to be hard for us to find the other fruits that we were hoping to get to make the fruit butters with. We had planned on making a Peach butter and we wanted to bring back our Cherry butter but those were the hardest hit fruits. So we were not able to do the Cherry butter at all, but we did find a peach source in PA.

Some may ask and have asked why we don't just buy "Washington Cherries" to make our Cherry butter with. Well the answer to that is a simple one. We only use local fruit. Local fruit by definition is 100 mile radius from our farm.

This is an important thing to us. Buying locally means keeping the money local. Buying from elsewhere would make it easier from a business perspective because we never really have to worry about not having a source for our fruit.

I guess to some it isn't smart to use ONLY local fruit. But what would make us different? What would make us stand out and make people more apt to buy our fruit butter or jam than the other 15 different kinds?

So this year we are working on getting some other sources that will be able to keep up with our load of fruits that we need.

As of right now we have put 300 + lbs of Blueberries in the freezer as well as black raspberries and will continue to add to that.

The kitchen is still underway we have hit a few snags along the way. Nothing major just having to "hurry up and wait." We are hoping to get rolling on things again this week. We shall see.


For now we will keep plugging along and wait for things to finish.