Millions of Peaches, Peaches for Me

Millions of Peaches, Peaches for Free. 

Our backyard peach tree has a bumper crop of large, delicious peaches! I absolutely love harvesting nature's bounty and preserving it in jams, bottled preserves, and freezer bags. This is the first real crop we've collected from our peach tree. The branches are heavy with fruit, and the peaches are growing in clusters of up to 6 peaches!

Rachael, Nathan, and I picked bowls full of fruit. Rachael was kind enough to begin washing the fruit in the kitchen while Nathan and I worked on collecting more.

Actually, Nathan did the picking while perched on the top of a precarious ladder, and I held the bowl up within his reach. It sounds terribly lazy of me, but in my defense I spent an hour picking fruit yesterday without him. Our bowls were quickly filled to capacity, so we'd pass them through the music room window to Rachael, who slipped up empty and clean bowls from the kitchen. Matthew was very eager to climb the tree and reach for fruit.

After picking everything we could reach, we worked together to pit and slice the fruit. I was very delighted to discover that this peach tree is a Freestone variety- which means the pits literally fall out of the fruit instead of clinging to the juicy flesh. Sarah and Matthew really enjoyed joining the assembly line. Rachael washed, Nathan did a long circumventing slice, Sarah and Matthew twisted the halves open and removed pits, and I sliced them and covered them with a sugar syrup.

I originally made a few batches of peach jam. The best one is Blueberry Peach Jam....oh it's like candy! After pouring the cooked jam into jars, the children and I gathered around the pot and collected the remnants of sticky jam with pieces of bread. Then we popped it into our mouths. It was SO good! 

We ran out of pectin, and TIME, so we just sliced and froze the remaining gallons of peaches so we can make cobblers, pies, fruit smoothies, and more jams later in the year.

It's hard work, and we're very tired, but there is something so deeply satisfying in harvesting food yourself and preserving it for later. Perhaps it's the pleasure that comes form good old-fashioned work.

I feel so happy and fulfilled with my work. And then there's the benefit of the food itself: there's no pesticides, and the flavor of tree-ripe peaches is unbeatable.