Peaches

Yesterday the kids and I joined some friends at a local farm to pick peaches. My goal was to pick 50lbs of peaches and I picked 51.5 lbs which is pretty gosh darn good guessing on my part! Six years ago was the first time I helped my Mom can (as an adult, I did my share of "helping" as a child!). I brought David and our friend Jim with me to pick peaches. Mom told us to pick 60lbs and we had no idea what 60lbs of peaches looked like. It sounded like a lot so we brought several big plastic milk crates. As we filled them I asked the boys how much they weighed and they thought we had about 60lbs after we filled four of them. Yes, FOUR of them. Turns out that four milk crates full of peaches is about 120lbs. We had peaches coming out our ears that year, though we didn't have to can peaches the next year!

Anyways, back to this year's peaches. Mom is super busy this fall as her house is in the process of being sold (yay!) and she's stressing about packing/moving/trying to find a new home etc. Definitely not the best time to help me can so I thought I'd give it a try by myself this year. I knew it would be harder but I didn't realize how much LONGER it takes to can by yourself. I started after I put the kids down to bed around 8pm and got my first bath in the canner sometime after 10pm. The peaches weren't quite ripe so they were a bit of a bear to skin and pit and some won't be so pretty in the jar. I'm also not as good at packing the jars full so the peaches float a bit. My kids won't care. I decided to try the hot pack method this time (we usually do cold pack) and it seemed to work just fine. I did two batches and I think I'll stop there. I'm not sure I have quite enough for another 7 jars and I'd rather use the remaining peaches in a cobbler and just to eat. I'll just hope that Mom is more settled next year and we can do a bigger batch. It's too much work for one person!

The last batch came out a little after midnight and I was ready to start cleaning up. As I started to pour out all the water I had in various pots/pans I realized the sink wasn't draining. I tried turning on the garbage disposal and got nothing. Not even a hum. God bless my husband, he was staying up with me and managed to diagnose the problem and fix it. It was 1am by the time I had the kitchen clean enough to let myself go to bed. I'm one tired Mama today!

I do have to say a big Thank You! to my brother who was over last night and was a huge help with getting the jars in and out of the canner. I don't know if our canner is broken or what, but it's pretty much a two person job to get the jars in and out without the dang metal part falling into the boiling water. I held the metal part so it wouldn't fall and he did the jar moving. Hope you enjoy the peaches I sent you home with!