Peaches and More Peaches

As soon as it was light,  I checked the hen house.  

The two chicken breast that I put out last night were gone.  They were in the pan of anti-freeze.  

When breakfast was over I went out to the orchard and began picking peaches.  While I was doing this, Carol was boiling water  and getting eighteen pint bottles ready for canning. 

Here Carol is getting the first batch ready to put in the boiling water.  When it came back to a boil, she set the timer for twenty minutes.

Here Carol is peeling the peaches.  The were put in boiling water for a couple of seconds which made it easy to peel.  I picked some peaches from the tree in the north west corner of the garden.  They are in the pot on the left side of the photo.  They are smaller and not as sweet as the peaches from the orchard.

Finished.  Eighteen pints.  I put printed labels with the date.  We had fried onions, peppers, zucchini and and meatloaf for supper.  The were very good.  this evening I put an open can of cat food in the hen house to see if the racoon would come back. I watered every thing in the garden.

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Peaches and Jam

I picked the peaches last night.  This morning we started the canning process.  Carol  put some in boiling water for a minute or so.  Then we started to peel.

Carol filled four bottles while was still working on the first one.  I changed knives and the work went much faster.

We had thirty-two pint bottles full of peaches.  That was four batches.  

 We drove to Fillmore before lunch.  Carol got a few groceries.  I bought the light fixture which is shown in the above photo.  I turned off the power and then removed the old fixture.  It has been flickering which was somewhat annoying.  I read the directions to make sure it did it right.  It was easily removed.  Putting the new one was difficult.  I worked on it for over an hour.  I finished and turned the power back on and it worked.

With the peaches left over we made six pints of peach jam.

Comments and questions are welcome.

Black Widow Patience

I did the yard watering.  I worked in house one for over an hour dropping the tomato plants.  I have dropped one row.  There are seven more to go.  I removed a couple of plants completely.  The fruit was small and thinly scattered throughout the plant.

I had planted strawberry seeds back in March.  The were transplanted into 3 1/2 inch pots.  They were slow to /grow, but by now the were doing good.  She put five of these strawberry plants in a large #7 .

When finished she had a nice strawberry container that will produce tiny strawberries until it freezes.

When I was watering I found this sphinx moth caught in a black widow spider web.  It was trying to get loose.  The black with came out and saw me and then went back into hiding. It took a lot of patience on the part of the black widow.  Later this evening the moth was dead.

 I planted beets about eight weeks ago and harvested this bundle of five beets.

I had them for lunch.  I had to boil them for about thirty minutes to get a soft bead.  I buttered the up and salt them down.   They tasted really good.

Yesterday, I used twine to stretch a line from each end of house six. This afternoon I wound it around this quart pot.

 It took me most of the afternoon to transplant the rest of the tomato plants.  They were planted at eighteen inch centers.  I used a bamboo stake and a tomato clip to hold them up straight.

The two photos above show the same plants.  One is of the left side and the other the right side.

 I was walking through the orchard checking out the fruit trees.  I had to duck under the dead branches.  I decided then and there that I would cut off  the branches.  There were a lot of them.  The picture above and the two below illustrates the pruning done.

 There are also a lot of peaches.

While I had the chain saw out, I cut off a low branch on this cherry tree.  I had to bend over every time I mowed around it.

I pruned this large seedless honey suckle tree.  One branch was rubbing some on the shingles of our house.  There is another branch rubbing on the roof of the garage.  That one is coming down in the morning.

I drug all the branch out to the trailer.  I may take it to the dump tomorrow if we have time.

The deer or a deer was in our yard again last night.


Comments and questions are welcome.

Canning Peaches

As soon as it was light this morning, we were in the garden picking beans.  I think that we got about a peck of green beans.  Carol washed them and took them to one of our neighbors on the other side of Town.

Last Friday, I picked a couple of bushels of peaches.

 They were not very big, but has big taste.  I tried to peel them, but it was difficult.  I figured out how to peel them after a couple sessions on You Tube.  The key was to let them sit, soften, a couple of days.  Today was the third day.  Carol put them in boiling water for 30 seconds, and the skins peeled right off.  by the time we finished peeling we had 48 half pints.

We haven't canned peaches for a long time.  She put them in a water bath for twenty minutes.  We finished around 11:30.



That was about it for the day.