Peaches, peaches, peaches!!
Our Home Teacher and his wife have been developing a sustainable mini-farm for the past few years, which includes a fairly sizable peach grove. It bore very heavily this year, and Char has been canning like mad--more than 100 quarts of sliced peaches, plus gallons of peach juice. They advertised peaches for sale for 50 cents a pound, so we bought a couple of bushels and canned them, plus they gave us a couple of bushels that were getting rather ripe. We canned them, too, over 100 pints, so far.
Yesterday, she called me to ask if I cold-packed them for canning. I said "Yes. I made a light syrup to put in them, but they were so juicy that I couldn't get more than a tablespoon or two in each jar." Apparently she had been pre-cooking them. A lot more work and time.
I thought that they were all done with peaches, as they had temple service, plus two other trips out of town this week, she said she wanted to do up a last batch before they left for Orlando. She told me that they weren't going to pick any more, and we were welcome to as many as we wanted to pick...that they were the Saturn peaches, which they don't like, but we could pick all we wanted.
So-oo, we went down and picked more than 6 bushels this morning, including a part bushel of canning peaches. Got 2 cannersful of juice done, put the other 4 bushels out in our cold storage, and will can both sliced and juice Monday. God bless good friends! Gave them some of our thornless blackberry plants, and will start some slips from our Concord, Red Flame, and New Himrod (the raisin grape) grapes. They have a lot of wild elderberry plants on their place, but haven't decided whether we'll dig some of them up, or order cultivated ones.
