Canning Peaches Today!

Today (on the hottest day of the year, of course!) I am canning peaches.   The peaches were a little early this year, as they are usually ready by the 31st.   This year I am canning them myself because my Mom isn't coming up here for the summer to help me with canning.   She is 92 now and the travel back and forth from Indiana to Minnesota is just a little too much for her.  Otherwise this has always been her favorite canning to do, and she has been helping me for the past 8 summers.   I ripened the peaches by the "damask linen method" (See my post from July 2013 under older posts)
     Canning peaches is easy and fun.  Here are the steps in photos to show the process:

First the ripened peaches are washed and de-stemmed.

While the jars are sterilizing in the big pot, I boil water to scald the peaches. 

The peaches are plunged into boiling water for 30-40 seconds to make the skins peel easier. 

Here I am peeling the peaches and putting them into water and lemon juice to keep fresh.

The peeled and sliced peaches are ready to go into the hot jars.

The finished product!  They all sealed, too.

This year I bought 4 boxes of peaches to can up.   You get about 8 or 9 jars to the box.  I had about 9 jars left from last year.  I always buy Mrs. Smittcamp's canning Peaches from the San Joachim Valley of California.  The supermarkets around here stock huge piles of boxes of these peaches (sometimes two shipments).  Just about everyone up here in these parts does canning - we're an "old-timey" bunch of folks here!  In the middle of winter when it's 30 below and the snow is deep, those peaches taste SO good!  You pretty much have to eat them as is, though, or with ice cream or whipped cream or in combination with other fruits.   I have tried making cobblers and pies with canned peaches and it doesn't work so well.  It is acceptable, but 'not like fresh'.  But canned peaches eaten as is, are wonderful.   I encourage you to try canning peaches.  You won't regret it.
     Last fall my husband bought me a stainless steel canner that he got at a garage sale for $5.  Because I can so many jars of various produce in a season (hundreds), I go through those black and white speckled canners like nothing.   They don't last more than a season and they are already burnt through on the bottom.   Those pots have a ridged bottom that doesn't seat well on an electric burner (sure wish I had a gas stove!).  Only about half of the pot really gets hot and the other parts are a waste of energy.   But this stainless steel canner has  a flat bottom and heats beautifully.   It should last me for many years.  Also stainless steel cleans easily and doesn't rust.  Finally after all these years of canning, I have a decent canning pot!
     I have always enjoyed canning.  Somehow it seems like getting back to homemaking roots.  My Mom and grandmothers did a lot of canning over the years.  Mom used to tell me that she admired the perfect peaches I am able to buy at the store because back in the 50's she bought peaches by the bushel at the farmer's market that came from Michigan, and they weren't always perfect and she would often have to cut out bruised parts and soft spots.  I found this photo on the internet of some unknown ladies admiring canning jars in the basement.   You can just see the pride on that lady's face as she is showing off her rows of hard work.   You just know her family was going to eat well that winter!  I believe this photo is from the 1940's.  Somehow I feel very connected to those ladies of the past.................

Still Being Blessed

Those of us who live in Minnesota KNOW how much rain we've had lately!  Pretty much the whole month of June and the early part of July now has been nothing but rain!  We are completely soaked.  In some parts of the state, there is even flooding.  I walked around today and shot some photos of the garden damage sustained this weekend.   We had "the worst storm yet" this past Saturday.  It kept everyone up in the wee hours of the morning, wondering if we were having a tornado.   The next day we woke up to this in my garden:

The torrential rains washed deep ruts in newly planted areas.

Poor little squash plant barely survived!

 

 

These ruts are about 8 inches deep.

Amazingly things are growing, though!  The rest of the garden seems to be OK, and our grapes are loving the warm, wet conditions.

The rest of the garden is doing as well as can be expected.

Check out these gorgeous grape clusters growing!  We'll have plenty of grapes!

Look what I found growing in the drainage ditch!  This year's perfect Christmas tree!

The grass and yard is basically a swamp, though.  Walking across the yard, everything "squishes" because of these conditions:

Would you believe more rain is expected today and tomorrow?  The yard is already a swamp!

The bees are doing well, too.  The wildflowers are nice and 'juicy' this summer with plenty of nectar,  and the bees are surviving nicely.   Here is another one of their favorite foods:  wild mustard.

Butterflies like wild mustard, too.

One of our two bee yards.  One hive has 2 honey supers already!  We have 11 hives.

After the fierce storm and high winds we got this Saturday, I thought my petunias were a goner.........but they look beautiful!   How they managed to survive the 50-60 mph plus winds is beyond me!

How did these petunias survive the storm?  What a wonderful blessing!

And finally, here's a little dose of "cute" - one of our tom cats in cooling off by the porch.  He doesn't have a name.  Can you think of one?  I've been calling him "Whitey" for obvious reasons and also because I can't think of any good names. 

What would be a good name for this tom cat?

All in all we feel very blessed.  Some things are not doing well (potato bugs have eaten up our potatoes and I sprayed with some bee-friendly insecticide which did nothing, and we have a skunk eating our hens' eggs), but all things considered it "could be worse" to quote a typical Minnesota saying!  We have not flooded, we have not lost our home, and the Lord has blessed us with plenty.   We'll still have lots of crops, lots of honey, lots of fruit, and life goes on here at Honey B Farm.