Life's a Peach

Whew!  I'm so glad that's over.  It all started with this...

This is the harvest from our big peach tree.  I even weighed them - over 200 pounds.  Pretty unbelievable, isn't it???  Factor in the fact that I thinned over 50 percent of the peaches off the tree when they were about the size of an olive.  One branch on the tree was completely unreachable, even with a ladder, so it didn't get thinned and yep, it broke under the weight of the peaches.  Oh, and I harvested about 30 additional pounds from the baby peach tree.  Yikes!  After convincing my children that they needed to eat some, I started processing.

Remember the empty freezer?  It's not so empty any more.  I sliced thirty oversize quarts worth of peaches to go into the formerly empty cavern.  (I usually process peaches into 5 cup 'quarts' as after the juice is drained, there's just enough peaches for most recipes.)

Then I fired up the canner.  First day, I made 'sploosh' for Ben...

He was a bit disappointed with the flavor, thought it was a bit weak compared to the apricot sploosh that he'd been drinking from past years.  So, I tweaked the recipe a bit.  On the next canning day, I went all out...

Ten quarts of sploosh and seven quarts of peach halves in extra light syrup.  Whew!  What a day!  Makes for a pretty picture, though, I think.  I hadn't canned peach halves in a long time, so I thought it was time to refresh my skills. 

I also made three peach pies, but forgot to get a picture before we ate one and put two into the freezer.  In addition, I've sliced up about three gallons of peaches that have gone into the fridge and then mysteriously disappeared.  Apparently Yehudi likes peaches.

After I rest a bit, I'll post about all the other goodies I've made lately.

My Favorite Chore ... Said No One Ever

I'm a little late getting this done this year.  Took me a while to talk myself into it, to be honest.  So here we are, a couple of hours later, bruised (literally), stiff and really glad it's done.

Cleaning out the freezer is one of those thankless chores where I spend hours working away, but when I'm done, it's hard to tell that I've done much of anything at all.  So, here's a picture of the clean, empty freezer.  See, I don't really sit around and eat bon bons and watch soap operas all day.

The real difficulty in defrosting this freezer isn't the amount of work.  It's my height.  I'm short enough that I can't reach the bottom of the freezer without hanging from the front side.  I've got bruises on the front of both hips now.  (No, absolutely no pictures of that as proof!)  Try as I might, I've never figured out another way to get the job done.  

 Here's the newly restarted, refilled freezer.  I got rid of some past date stuff, organized the rest and now there's room for...

the couple of bushels of apples that you see here as well as the couple of bushels of peaches that you can't see.

Busy, Busy, Busy

Canning season is now in full swing.  I processed goodies three days in a row this week and will be cooking something up most every day for the foreseeable future.  I've put together a long to-do list for this year.  And FTR, I do really enjoy canning.  Makes me so happy to hear the lids pop as they seal and love looking at row after row of bottles on the shelf.  But it is a lot of work and I get so tired after a day of chopping, stirring and steaming.  lol.

An hour's worth of picking yielded this bounty of lovelies.

First round...seven quarts of crushed tomatoes.  I was so happy with the ones that I bottled last year that more of these were high on the to-do list this year.  So far, I'm pretty happy with the 'Rutgers' tomato variety that I grew this year.  This batch included a lot of very small tomatoes due, I think, to the high night time temperatures we've been having.  Hopefully, once the temps cool a bit, more of the tomatoes will be of the large size.  At any size, they are very tasty both fresh and cooked.  And, I have to admit, it gives me a little thrill that I started these tomatoes out from seed back in January. 

Seven pints of tomatillo salsa.  This year's batch is awesome!  Last year's was pretty good, this one is really tasty.  I've eaten most of the approximate one cup left over after bottling.  I'm planning on a couple more batches as, not only is it very tasty, but this picking was less than one third of the tomatillo crop currently ripe.  I've also been researching chili verde recipes to make and freeze.  Can't wait to try those!

Two pints 'pickle' relish from a new recipe.  With only about a tablespoon overage in this batch, we didn't get much of a taste yet, but what we had was yummy.  Mike was home when I processed these and he approves of the finished product, too.  We sat down and figured out that the two of us would need at least 10 pints of relish total to get us through a year.  Yeah.  That's a lot!  We both like it on hot dogs, in tuna salad and my potato salad recipe uses up to a cup per batch.  I'll be making much more of this during this canning season.

I also made a couple of discoveries about canning this week.  First, I can't possible grow enough cilantro to keep up with demand.  I have a real love-hate relationship with cilantro.  I think it smells and tastes like old sweat socks.  I've tried substituting other herbs for it in recipes, but the plain truth is, Mexican salsas don't taste like they should without cilantro.  So, I keep trying to grow it, but it's always already bolted by the time I need it.  I guess I should be planting a few plants every week to keep a fresh supply on hand, but I just don't have room in the garden for that.  I'll just have to keep running to the store for cilantro every time I make salsa.

Also, we're going to have way more apples and peaches than we can eat this year.  Turns out, too many peaches isn't going to be much of a problem as Ben has rediscovered 'sploosh' and is willing to drink as much of it as I can bottle.  Apples, on the other hand, are going to be trickier to deal with.  I've been researching apple pie filling and applesauce recipes and will probably be trying out some new ones this year.

Last, I really just might be losing my mind.  I was down in our food storage room grabbing yet another box of pint jars to fill, when I had the thought 'wouldn't it be fun to fill every jar with somthing yummy this year?' flash through my head.  I put the craziness down to boiling vinegar brain-damage, but it does keep coming back.  I think it would be cool to fill all the jars and maybe even have to buy a few more.  Hopefully, that's just my overachieving OCD self talking and not some kind of divine inspiration about how high food prices are going to be this winter. 

In The Garden - August 9

Everything is changing quickly in the garden now!  I can see changes from the time I check the beds in the morning until I check in the evening.  I don't even want to talk about how fast the zucchinis are growing!

The apple crop is huge this year, which may not be a good thing.  Not only do we have more apples than we need, but we may have more apples than the little tree can sustain without damage.  However, I'm not the gardener in charge of thinning them, so I guess we'll just see how this all ends up.

On our larger peach tree, the peaches are beginning to blush a bit.  The peaches are still a bit small, but seem to get larger every time I water the tree.  Ben is looking forward to a fresh batch of 'sploosh' this year.  Looks like we'll have plenty for that as well as pie!

This hibiscus is such a show off.  Never content to unfurl one bloom at a time, it opens a whole party of the lovely fancy-dress blooms at a time.

Each bloom is about 10 inches in diameter and such a beautiful pink.  I'm so glad that I found this variety!

The Rudbekia 'Goldsturm' is especially floriferous.  And so bright in color!  I'd like to have some more clumps of this in the yard, but I'm not sure if all 'Goldsturm' is this amazing.  I may just need to wait until these are ready to divide rather than risk being disappointed.

Pumpkin Watch 2012

Whoa!  It's pumpkin season again.  I planted 'Rouge Vif  D'Etampes' (the Cinderella pumpkin) and 'Jarradale' pumpkins this year.  The vines have been huge for a couple of months, but suddenly, the pumpkins are getting big, too.  And some of these guys are starting to scare me a bit!

This one is actually ripening in the asparagus bed (that's the ferny stuff that you can see) about 10 feet away from where the plant is actually rooted.

 This is actually the darkest orange pumpkin in the patch.  It's not quite a foot in diameter.

This is 'Big Mama'!  This one is nearly twenty feet away from the first one pictured, actually at the end of the bed and almost to the fence.  It's also, so far, the biggest of all, about 15 inches in diameter and still growing. By Halloween, this one might actually be big enough to make Cinderella a coach from without any magic required.

This is one of the 'Jarradale' pumpkins looking not quite so festive.  They are still quite green, but will eventually turn grey blue.  This type is supposed to be a better long-term storage pumpkin which will be quite a feat as the Cinderella pumpkins usually stay good into February in my experience.

Just a note to my little pumpkin-loving buddies: No matter how many pumpkins Granny grows, we still have a date for the pumpkin patch this fall. That is one of the highlights of the harvest season! lol.