With summer in full force here, cherry season isn’t far behind. We don’t have a cherry tree on our property. We’d thought about it and discussed it, but our garden space is so small, a tree would take up too much room. Thankfully, a friend’s parents have a cherry tree on their property and don’t want any of the cherries, so they call us up every summer to come and pick them.

For us, tart cherries are ready for picking in late July. I remember this specifically because in 2023 we went and frantically picked all the cherries before heading to the theatre for the Barbie movie. We arrived all sweaty and gross—because it was one of the hottest days in July—and the car smelled of fresh cherries when the movie was over.

Last year, we harvested over 45 pounds of tart cherries from their one tree. Unfortunately, the tree is slowly dying, so it’s likely our harvests will get smaller every year, so we might have to look around our neighbourhood to see who has a cherry tree and offer to harvest their cherries for them.

With 45 pounds of cherries—or even with a much smaller amount—an urban homesteader needs an arsenal of recipes to preserve those cherries. Here are my top five ways to preserve tart cherries.

1. Cherry Juice

Interestingly, my post on how to can cherry juice is my most popular post on this site. As well, presently, if you search “how to can cherries” on Google, the Google AI summary references this post. Given all the attention it gets, I recently went back and tightened it up a little bit.

These instructions are specifically for tart cherry juice, as that is what I was working with. But after a little digging, I learned that these same instructions should work for sweet cherry juice as well. Both tart and sweet cherries are acidic enough for water bath canning.

We use primarily use tart cherry juice as an additive to homemade kombucha.

Click here to read my post about canning tart cherry juice, or check out the recipe below.

Need to juice cherries first?

If you have a steam juicer, which is a set of three interconnected pots to extract juice from fruit and vegetables—which I highly recommend— you can juice cherries with your steam juicer. I have a full set of instructions here. (In the photo below, these cherries were frozen until I was ready to juice them, which is why they look a little frosty.)

If you don’t have a steam juicer, this post from Alpha Foodie explains a handful of other ways to juice cherries. However, the benefit of the steam juicer is that you don’t have to pit the cherries. You don’t even have to pull the stems off. So if you’re going to be juicing a lot of cherries or if you have a tree and will be doing this yearly, it would be to your benefit to invest in a steam juicer. They’re basically all the same, so I can’t really recommend a certain brand, but here they are on Amazon.

It’s important to note that I tested the acidity of my cherry juice before canning. If you’re using a juice extraction method that involves adding a lot of water, you may want to invest in some pH strips to ensure your acidity is well below 4.6 for safe canning.

2. Canning Cherries

If you prefer to eat your cherries whole, you should try canning cherries. I did this for the first time last year and the process was remarkably easy (once I got past the very lengthy process of pitting the cherries). You can find my post about the whole process here.

Following directions for canning tart cherries from another site, I went with a fairly light syrup when I canned them, but they came out incredibly tart. I’d recommend using a heavier syrup for tart cherries. But if you’ve got sweet cherries, a lighter syrup is probably best because the fruit is already pretty sweet.

Canned cherries definitely lose some of their texture and freshness. I don’t think I’d open a jar of canned cherries and eat them whole like I would with a handful of fresh cherries. But these are good to throw in fruit salad, to top ice cream with, or to use place of a maraschino cherry in cocktails.

Click here for the full post on canning cherries, or use the recipe card below.

3. Cherry Liqueur

In my never-ending quest to look for creative ways to use garden produce for food and drink, I quite often end up making alcohol recipes. A few years ago I stumbled across this cherry liqueur recipe on Serious Eats.

This recipe calls for sweet cherries, but since I have tart cherries I make it with what I have. I follow the recipe exactly, just swapping out the cherry types. This is an absolute winner of a recipe. If I pull out a bottle of this at a barbecue or a family gathering, the bottle is very quickly emptied.

The only alteration I make the recipe is in step two where you make a cherry syrup and store it in the fridge for a week. I’m always concerned about things like that growing mould, so I freeze it for a week instead.

I didn’t make cherry liqueur last summer and I deeply regretted it because it’s so amazingly good. It’ll be near the top of my preserving list this year.

4. Cherry Wine

If you have some experience with winemaking, I highly recommend making a batch of cherry wine. While most folks would likely think of cherry wine as a sweet drink, it works amazingly with tart cherries too.

Practical Self-Reliance has a great cherry wine recipe to get you started.

Like with the cherry liqueur, I didn’t make a batch of wine last year and regret it. Wine will also be high on my to-do list this year. And like cherry liqueur, if I bring out cherry wine at a barbecue or family gathering, it’s very quickly gone because it’s so addictively delicious.

5. Cherry Jam

Tart cherries make a lovely jam for spreading on pastries or morning toast. The Frugal Farm Wife has a great, easy-to-follow recipe on their site.

The recipe requires that cherries be pitted and stemmed before making jam. Sometimes sour cherries will go brown if they’re cut, so by the time you’ve pitted them all, some of your earlier cherries might be an unsightly colour. To help prevent this, you can put pitted cherries in a bowl of water with a splash of lemon juice—this will help preserve the colour while you pit the whole batch, so everything is gorgeously red when you’re ready to make your jam.

Preserve Your Garden Harvest With Confidence

If you’re like me and you have a garden full of dozens of different plants (we typically have 50+ different crops), then you need a great guide to get you started on preserving your harvest. I recently released my first cookbook, Preserving Your Urban Harvest, which includes 73 recipes to preserve 21 common garden favourite crops. The cherries section features the two recipes above—cherry juice and canning cherries. You can click here to find out more and order your copy.