Millions of Peaches, Peaches for Free

When we moved into our house almost five years ago, we immediately started planting. We couldn’t wait for our yard to stop looking like this:

We weren’t picky about what got planted, just as long as it grew. Bushes, shrubs, and trees alike were welcome in our backyard. For awhile it felt like we were practically living in Home Depot’s garden department.

Among those first plantings were several fruit trees. An apple tree, a mandarin orange tree and a peach tree, specifically. We planted, fertilized (once, I think, maybe), and then crossed our fingers. Wouldn’t it be great to have fresh fruit?! From our own tiny backyard?! In the middle of suburbia?!

Well, in the intervening years, we’ve picked plenty of fresh produce from our backyard garden beds. Tomatoes, peppers, green onions, zucchini, snap peas, carrots and even a few blackberries and strawberries have all been harvested. But our fruit trees have been stubbornly unproductive. Until this year.

Because this year, our peach tree decided to bear fruit. And bear it did. Although the title above may be slightly misleading (we didn’t get millions of peaches, after all), final count of lovely, ripe, baseball-sized peaches picked off our one little peach tree was 277. I kid you not! And that’s even after we did some serious fruit thinning (taking off about half of the developing fruit) early in the season to encourage a good harvest of the remaining fruit. Guess it worked!

So what’s a family our size to do with 277 peaches? Well, learn to can, of course. There’s nothing like a deadline of quickly ripening fruit to encourage speed-learning. We all got in on the act. The littles helped pick and peel mountains of peaches. I made peach berry and spiced peach jams (ending up with twelve half-pints of super-low-sugar jams – yum). And Alexander got a crash course in waterbath canning after I came down with the cold-from-Hades and couldn’t help in the canning efforts anymore. He single-handedly canned 24 quarts of no-sugar-added, juice-packed peaches. And the following day, the kids really enjoyed drinking his “homemade” white grape peach juice (the leftover juice that the peaches had been boiled in prior to canning). We all tried to wish our freezer larger in hopes of accommodating bags and bags of frozen peaches. {They all fit, by the way. Just don’t try opening the freezer!}

Canning is hot work. And there were a number of times during the process when we wondered to ourselves (and sometimes out loud), “How much exactly is a can of peaches from the grocery store?” But I have to say, when all was said and done, there was something extremely satisfying about doing it ourselves. It may sound cheesy, but it feels pretty awesome being self-reliant. Every time I look into the pantry and see the jars of peaches I think, “We did that.” And it’s truly a proud-mama moment when the kids request “the jam you made” on their peanut butter sandwiches.

P.S. This is not a peach...

...It’s a cantaloupe. Our first ever. And it was good. As was it’s similarly-sized, garden-bed buddy, a watermelon we picked at the same time. Hard to beat garden-fresh melons on a hot summer evening.