Transformational Peaches

Nothing improves my day more than a fresh ripe peach from my own tree. I've been potty training Rosie for the last month, which comes with many frustrations.  Potty training accidents eat up all of my patience. I finished cleaning up another terrible accident  just before lunch and was starting to feel grouchy.  Then I sliced up one of these and shared it with the kids and the whole incident was forgotten. It was full of real peachy flavor that I hadn't tasted in  years. A truly transformational peach.

Sunflowers

Russ planted sunflowers in front of our house a few months ago. I've never been much of a flower person, so I was a little sceptical.  They grow quickly - the tallest of these is probably eight feet high - and in the last week they have started to bloom. I've spent the last hour sitting in the front room admiring the flowers while the rest of my family is in bed sick. They are beautiful.

Not My Favorite Job

A few weeks ago I tried canning some peaches (pictured above) and some apricots (pictured below). The apricots were fairly straightforward. Slice them in half, remove the pit, put them in hot jars, add syrup and place the jars in the canner. To can peaches, you follow the same process, except you need to blanch and peel the  peaches before you put them in hot jars. I blanched the peaches (put them into boiling water for a minute, then into ice water) but they would not peel. I tried blanching them again, this time for two minutes and they still wouldn't peel. I ended up removing the peels with a paring knife, which was not a fun or quick job. After discussing the problem with my mother-in-law, an experienced canner, I realised that the super cheap peaches I used were probably not ripe enough. Grrr. Hopefully I'll forget this experience and be willing to try again next year.

Sweet Loving Nature

Russ pulled this piece of comb from one of our hives and stuck his finger in to taste it. The amber-colored liquid looks like honey, but it isn't, as it hasn't been aged. It tastes like honey-flavored corn syrup. Alex and I have been enjoying it for the last few days. I can't wait for the real thing.

The garden might be dead, but at least we have apricots

As I was writing the last post, the apricots were starting to ripen, but  I was worried we would lose most of them to birds and bugs. The Chinese apricots did much better than expected and we dried them. I used to think of dried fruit as being somewhat tasteless and unexciting, but home-dried apricots are the opposite. I never had a dried apricot before I met Russ' parents. They used to have several large apricot trees and would dry the fruit every year. I tasted some when I first met them and was hooked. We eat them plain and add them to soups. The trick is to let them ripen as much as possible and then dip them in sugar syrup before placing them in the dehydrator.

The Learning Process

When I was a child, my family had a vegetable garden one summer, but other than that I have no prior gardening experience. Its a learning process. Gardening, and especially gardening in the desert at a high altitude, poses some unique problems. Its the middle of summer and almost everything in the garden is dead or dying, even with daily watering. The temperature regularly hits 100 degrees Fahrenheit and its never cloudy. The pumpkin starts I planted two days ago didn't have a chance and I planted my tomatoes, borlotti beans, summer squash, zucchini, strawberries and butternut squash  too late in the season for them to be established by the time high summer arrived. I'm trying to start some basil and pumpkins indoors (pictured above), but I don't know if they'll have a chance. Next year, I'll know better.

On a brighter note, the trees in the orchard are doing very well. Russ and I picked 20-25 pounds of beautiful orange apricots from one tree last night and they will be going into the dehydrator later today.

Nancy gets a little too excited at the prospect of cheap strawberries

After canning 20 jars of cherries, I was feeling like the Food Preservation Queen. I borrowed my mother-in-law's 30 year old fruit dehydrator and dried a bunch of cherries. The dried cherries resemble large raisins, with a hole in the middle where the pit/stone was punched out. 

Yesterday, Russ went shopping and came back with a few pounds of strawberries that he had purchased for 75 cents per pound, a fabulous price. Later, I drove back to the store and bought 24 pounds of overly-ripe strawberries. I prepared them for drying as soon as I got home and today, a day later, they're nearly done.