Sour cherries are not just sour. Many low-sugar fruit are high in flavour. Once you add sweetness they are wow. Sour cherry jam is the best jam in the multiverses, richly red and full of flavonols and flavour and soft and sticky lumps of cherry. Spread it on pikelets or scones or toast, but it's good enough to stand on its own: make your favourite pastry (see below) and make a jam roly-poly, with the hot jam oozing out, waiting for you to smother it in ice cream.

It's taken me more than 20 years to work out how to grow cherries. Option one – buy already established and bearing trees that are sexually compatible, then pick and eat. Option two – forget about the cherries' sex life and trying to get compatible varieties because they never ever bloom at the same time except in garden catalogues or display gardens.

Instead buy some of the more modern varieties, like Stella, that self-pollinate. Every little white blossom turns into a fruit and, yes, some will fall in dry seasons or if we have late frost and, triple yes, a nice shortish variety like a Stella is easily netted to keep the birds off. But you will – in some seasons – get the most luscious harvest ever.

Be careful with bird netting.Birds can get tangled in some kinds. We use two kinds. The first is not netting but paper or calico bags that can be slipped over large, bird-tempting fruit like quinces or persimmons. The other are ``bird sleeves", close-meshed tubes that can be pulled over branches with lots of fruit like cherries, though the bags work pretty well if your cherry produces long dangling earring-like clumps.

Apart from general deliciousness, cheapness (free) and total smugness, an advantage of growing your own cherries is that you can grow ones that are almost impossible to buy in supermarkets or even farmers' markets. Try yellow cherries. Yes, I know that instinct says that the best cherry is a deep purple red one, but yellow cherries are sublime. So are white ones – undistinguished looking, so much so that again (if you are lucky) even the birds will ignore them. But their flavour is rich and delicate.

Sour cherries are perhaps the best backyard option. They seem hardier in droughts and frost. There are few years we don't get some, though once the birds taste a single cherry the crop vanishes about 10 minutes later.

The other glory of backyard cherries is that they thrive on neglect. More cherries are killed by kindness than neglect. Overfeed them and they'll split. Prune them and they'll get wood rot. Just let them grow. If they get pear and cherry slug when young – the trees, not the slugs, which are actually sawfly larvae – dust them with flour, a messy but effective form of extermination. You can also use good old glue spray, which can be sprayed from a pump action device onto tall trees: one cup white flour, one cup boiling water, mix well, add enough cold water till it's sprayable and strain through a fine sieve or the lumps will clog the sprayer. Wash well after use or you'll need to soak the glued-up sprayer for a week before you can use it again.

The other option is to grow the cherries down the back behind the shed where the pear and cherry slug won't bother you. (They do look yuck. Magnify them and you'd have the villains of a horror movie.) Once your cherry (or pear) tree is about five or six years old and twice your height, it can usually cope with pear and cherry slug. Yep, it'll look ugly and will possibly almost entirely defoliate the tree in bad years. But it will regrow the next year especially with a small – a very small – amount of fertiliser and watering.

Forget about ``Peel me a grape, darling" as the height of garden decadence. Please pick me a bowl of cherries beats it hands down.

This week I'm:

* hoping the young corn and coriander survives without watering while I'm away – rain, sky, please rain;

* waiting for the first dahlia bud to open. Hope it's a deep red one;

* eating peaches!;

* getting bored with artichokes;

* loving deep orange pomegranate blooms;

* hoping we might just get tomato salad for Christmas; and

* wishing I had planted melons in a heated frame so we might have mini melons for Christmas too. Though peaches, apricots and cherries are pretty festive by themselves.

How to pick a lemon

Picking fruit with some kids last week, I realised none of them knew the trick. Do not just tug or you may get the whole branch, bird's nest and all. Hold fruit firmly, then twist sharply and the fruit will come off in your hand. Soft fruit like white peaches and raspberries bruise easily. You can prevent this by eating them immediately, even before you get to the house.

Avocados are best picked with stalks on so they don't rot from that end. So are melons and pumpkins and cherries. If possible, pick your fruit when it is fully ripe for the best flavour. Fruit may soften after picking but, in general, they won't gain more flavour.

If they fall prematurely the trees may be water stressed, or the fruit may have been blown off by wind or be infected by fruit fly or codling moth. Feed windfalls to the chooks to stop the fruit fly having productive family lives breeding more fruit fly. And ditto for the codling moth.

If you don't have chooks, don't compost fallen fruit, unless it is a hot and professional compost operation (very few are). Seal in a garbage bag and leave in a hot place for at least two months till all is squished and cooked. Then compost, if you dare. It stinks.

Recipes

Rum Balls

These are not health food. But they are easy. And so much fun.

10 Weetbix

¾ cup sultanas

¼ cup rum

4 tbsp coconut plus 4 tbsp extra to roll them in

2 tbsp cocoa

¼ cup grated dark chocolate

395 gm tin condensed milk, sweetened

Soak sultanas in the rum overnight.

Mix, roll into balls, then roll in coconut. Keep in a sealed container in the fridge till set. Last for several weeks. Ahem.

Jumbuck Stew

Was given this by a kid from School of the Air. It's what the swaggie would have eaten at the billabong if he were on the road with a four-wheel drive vehicle. This is not gourmet tucker, but you will be surprised how good it is, especially eaten outside.

1 kg lamb chops, fat trimmed off

2 tbsp plain flour

2 tbsp curry powder

1 tbsp ground ginger

2 large onions, peeled and chopped

2 tbsp brown vinegar

4 tbsp Worcestershire sauce

4 tbsp tomato sauce

2 tbsp brown sugar

2 litres stock

3 cups pumpkin or sweet potato, in chunks

optional: large spuds cut into chunks (makes a thicker gravy)

Brown the chops then add the onions and continue cooking till the onions are soft. Stir in the flour till not lumpy.

Add all the other ingredients but pumpkin or sweet potato and simmer for two hours. Cool, skim off fat. Add the veg. Simmer again till it's cooked.

This reheats well.

Cheats' Frozen Tiramasu

This is from the Mum of one of the School of the Air kids.

300 ml thickened cream, whipped

20 large sponge finger or savoiardi biscuits

4 cups vanilla ice cream

½ cup rum or Baileys or Kahlua

grated dark chocolate

Layer half the biscuits, sprinkle on half the alcohol. Add a layer of ice cream. Repeat with the rest of the biscuits. And then layer on more ice cream. Freeze in a covered dish. When ready to serve top with the cream and grated chocolate.

Note: orange juice can be used instead of the alcohol.