I'm Drowning....Someone Throw Me a Life Preserver

Look and this nice, tidy row of peaches. 

I finished off the peaches we got from the farm stand, dusted off my hands and gave a very self-satisfied sigh. Yeah, we're going to get back to that self-satisfied sigh in a minute.

This right here? This is a true act of love. This is ketchup. Why bother, you might ask? Well, this represents my husband's childhood. From the recipe, which is his grandmother's, to the stirring....constant stirring over multiple days as it reduces....to the smell that permeates the house, to the taste testing. My husband supervises the whole process, and when he finally says it's just right, I put it into bottles. He loves this stuff, and since I love him, I'm willing to do it every few years to lay in a supply of something that means so much to him. That said, it's a real pain in the rear to do. I was feeling so accomplished, so self-satisfied (that word again...) with what I had done, when Evan's family came over on Monday, and began to pick the garden. And they picked, and picked, and picked....

....and then it came inside, and I was instantly overwhelmed.

I need to do some tomato juice, but it's one of the few things for which I require my husband's help. He isn't available right now to tackle this project, so I'm slipping the skins on these and the 2 other containers full of tomatoes in the back hall, and freezing them until he needs space in the freezer to put some kind of butchered critter. Then he'll be willing to do the tomato juice.

And lastly, there's the story behind these boxes of peaches. Know what these are? They're the peaches off our tree. My husband and I came home from a work picnic at dusk earlier this week, and began to pick these. It didn't take too long. We have a dwarf tree and while we have more peaches that we've ever had on it, we just didn't realize exactly how many there actually were. We picked the last of them by the light of the flashlights on our phones. There's at least 2 bushels in these boxes. The panic is real. I just finished 30 quarts of farmstand peaches, and now I'm wondering why we bought peaches at all. I'm going to have a 7 year's supply of bottled peaches. The new rule is, if it looks like the peach tree is going to produce, we aren't buying ANY peaches.

 

Comments

[Eye guy]

We’ll take some peaches to dehydrate. They’ll be good snacks

[Me]

I think I should royalties on the peaches.

[AP Man]

wow! produce bonanza.