On August 8, Jacob and I tried canning peaches for the first time with relative success. We purchased a half bushel of peaches and after sacrificing a few to mold and a few to stomachs, we ended up getting 11 quarts of peaches out of the batch. It probably should have been less than that, because once we filled and sealed them, the peaches floated and since we used a light syrup, we are thinking it was because we didn’t pack them densely enough. We followed the instructions from PickYourOwn.org for canning and making the syrup (we did the ‘very low calorie’ option). We had an entertaining time peeling the peaches – some needed to boil a little longer so they were hard to peel – but it’s always really satisfying when you get a peach that the skin just falls off of. Cutting the peaches into slices was a very juicy mess (we had some lemon juice left in the fridge that we sprinkled on the peaches to keep them from turning brown) and we had some issues with our syrup because a lot of it had evaporated by the time we were ready to boil the peaches AND we had too many peaches for the darn pot! That was quite tricky and I’m not sure if they all got enough boiling in…We packed the peaches and sealed them in the water bath canner – all sealed successfully! Hurrah! We will have a can of peaches per month!
We also got 5 pounds of blueberries (again some of them went to stomachs before they could be frozen). We washed them and put them in freezer bags. We got 12 cups of berries out of that batch, which is enough to make three blueberry pies or some other concoctions.
We also picked our first watermelon and tomatoes this weekend. Unfortunately, the watermelon was not ripe…a sad waste that goes to the compost bin. The tomatoes are beautiful heirlooms that look like big Romas which I am very excited to try!
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