How to Make a Homemade Cherry Picker

Last week I posed a question to the cyber world: **Smart People**: if you had a very, very, very tall cherry tree, how would you get the cherries when a ladder was not an option?

I got a lot of responses with all kinds of excellent and curious suggestions. I can’t show you the answers on my Facebook because my page was migrated and merged with my other older pages so that we have one juicy page but in the process all of the historical content was lost. *sigh* I don’t like technology. I need to find a way to rid myself of it.

So I made a homemade cherry picker. That was my answer to technology.

This is the tree in question. Can we take a moment to ask why it took me several decades to even notice that this was a cherry tree?

First a loquat tree, now a cherry tree. I’m on a roll people. But instead of the squirrels leading me to it this time, it was my brother’s dog Charlie that gets the credit.

While in New York, I have been charged with training him on the electric fence (Charlie, not my brother) so this little edge was the border and while we were lingering there I noticed… cherries!

Charlie didn’t understand what the big deal was. So he rolled his eyes and ate bird poop. Then he brought over a dead bunny. We have different tastes, Charlie and I.

But this was the dilemma. While it was filled to the brim with cherries, how on earth was I supposed to get them? Too many decades had passed, and I hadn’t pruned the tree to my advantage. After much contemplation, this was my solution…

We owned a small little rake, which is dainty and useful for working small areas, like underneath the roses that I was fertilizing with rose tone that evening.

And then I found a very long wooden pole in the shed where the rakes are kept.

And so I fastened them together with heavy duty masking tape.

And I put down a very large tarp, since there was no point in pulling the cherries down if I couldn’t retrieve them easily afterward.

Look at them all!

They were beckoning to me.

So I reached up and started pulling.

And then I roped my mom in so I could take a picture.

Look at these beauties. They were as sweet as can be.

And wait til you see what I made with them…

The moral of the story is this: If you have fruit to pick that isn’t especially low hanging, a little rake, a little masking tape, and a big stick will solve your problems, and fruit cobbler shall be yours.

Make a fruit picker today!