Canning Peaches

It's the most wonderful time of the year! Peaches and peaches and peaches!!

We've been a bit behind on processing and putting up fruits and veggies for the year. But, peaches are looking great.
We got three big crates and spent all of Tuesday peeling, cutting, jarring, and eating so many peaches!
We ended up with about two dozen jars of peaches, which will hopefully last us until next season.





It's all worth it. Charlie goes crazy for peaches, and who doesn't love a good fruit pie in the middle of winter? Warm and gooey, with a big scoop of ice cream.. now it's so simple. We really love local and fresh too, so this is our best option.

It is a LOT of work though, so I was more then happy when Mom got home from work to help with the jarring part. My goodness, I could not have finished without her.

So, here's how we do our peaches..

We look for the best, ones with big bad spots are put aside to be cut up and frozen (or eaten while we work). This just makes it a little bit easier when we're peeling and slicing the peaches we plan to can. You don't want any bruises going into the jar because that can ruin the whole container. You want something that is at a good ripeness, the kind that gives a little when you squeeze it, but doesn't drip juice.

So the best ones are washed, get a small x (let's say quarter size) cut into the bottom, and parboiled..
- This is a ~30 second bath in boiling water then plop them right into an ice bath. Once cooled off (10 seconds) I pull them out and grab one of those flaps from the x we cut in the bottom. This just helps it peel a bit easier. Also, here's where it's important to really have the best, properly ripened peaches. Too ripe and you'll lose a lot of flesh, not ripe enough and it's very hard to peel.

Once they're peeled we check for any bruises and cut out the pit. I like mine to be halved or quarter when I open them up in the winter, so cut to whatever your preference is. You should be left with a big bowl of beautiful peach flesh with no bruises and not pits or stems.

Toss those peaches into a jar until it is almost full. Now there is a liquid added into the peaches to keep them at the right consistency. If you want no sugar added, you can just fill it up to a half inch below the rim, with water. If you aren't worried about it make a simple syrup and toss that in it's place. This year, for the first time, we made a light simple syrup with local honey. I boiled about 4 cups of water to a cup and a half honey. (occasionally a little less honey, we'll see how it turns out). I love honey, in everything, so hopefully theseare as delicious as usual!
 ** The simple syrup is to keep the color and consistency of the peaches, adding water will not hurt the peaches, but they may brown a bit more and not quite stay the same. Totally your own preference.

So jars are full and ready to hit the water bath. Mom and I had a disagreement, and met in the middle, at 25 minutes. All the tops popped, no casualties. All in all, a pretty good canning experience.

 Here we are right in the middle of a few steps at once, we've got some fresh peaches, peeled peaches, peaches in need of simple syrup, and a few ready to go. It really was a team effort.

And in case you were wondering, of COURSE Charlie was helping us. Here she is getting sleepy, so mom took a break to read her a book. 

May flowers, bring fruit

April showers bring may flowers, and with those flowers come delicious fruits. We've got strawberries turning red, blackberries with big beautiful flowers and fruits just showing, tons of raspberries, and a bush overflowing with blueberries!

Our extra big blackberry plants

One of our nice ripe strawberries

Beautiful raspberry vines growing wild 

Other then the flowering fruit plants around the property, the gardens are doing exceptional for this early! We've had some very hot, sunny days. The nights are warmer, and our plants are really beautiful. 

I got a few pictures to show off how proud we are of these plants :)

Potatoes in an old, cleaned up hot tub 

Mom's rows of kale, spinach, peas, beans, and cauliflower. 

Enormous Caulifower

Wild, green garlic that we are very patiently waiting to be ready to enjoy!

A tomato plant popped in as well. Seems this soil really just had great seeds in it from last year. We've got escarole, tomatoes, and lettuce that are popping up in surprise places. No complaints here! We love the edible surprises. 

A few more weeks and we'll have all sorts of snacks to pick. For now we'll enjoy the strawberries and leafy greens. Gotta love backyard snacks : )

Spring Cleaning

This beautiful weather had us outside all weekend dong our own version of spring cleaning. Don't get me wrong, our windows could be cleaned, floors mopped, and furniture moved around, but it was NOT stay inside weather. So we took to the gardens. With fifteen acres, it's hard to keep everything maintained and well landscaped (sorry dad!). Thinking back on what this property was ELEVEN years ago when we moved in though, I think we've made some great progress! This summers projects include putting in a small patio off the side door, push back some of the overgrown shrubbery back by the pool, and working on our fabulous gardens.

Our cleaned up herb garden (april)

Mom added some new apple trees to the back yard along with our budding blackberry bushes, raspberries, and blueberries. We also spent some time moving the rock garden to prepare for the new patio. We pulled up some vinca vine, it had about 5 years to grow freely, so it's a disaster. We got rid of the rest of the leaves to see what was growing under there, and found all our herbs coming back beautifully! Also some clematis, columbine, and other wonderful flowers popping up.
Donnie had tilled my garden for me, so I planted a few seeds and some of mom's started tomato plants. Mom planted lots of plants of her own, tomatoes, kale, brussels.

In the fall Mom planted and properly covered some garlic. It worked perfectly! We have some beautiful garlic growing here. Soon we'll be pulling it up to have fresh garlic for the first time!

With all of our planting, tilling, and cleaning up, Charlie watched and kept us on our toes. We found which leaves she liked best (the dead ones) and how entertaining it can be to just observe the chickens. Overall, she was a big help. And, we've got our first strawberry out there in April!

My little strawberry

Garden Growth

 Some spring updates from the farm:

  Our February additions to the flock are growing! At nine weeks now, everyone is outside, with no light, and lots of room to roam. We've given them an unused shed and Donnie's been adding on to their run. These two are our trouble makers. Above, our sicilian buttercup is eyeing me up as I tried to put he back into the run. To the right is Morty, our polish (hen) sunbathing, clearly unaffected by my arrival. A few of these hens are for sale since we just do not need 15 new hens!

We've got lots going on in the garden. Peas, strawberries, oregano, chives, asparagus (for the first time is coming up nicely!!) and other greens are popping up.

Lots planted, lots in the green house! We are ready for this summers excellent veggies. This weekend we got some potatoes in the ground on one side of the yard and some squash in the other. 

Here's a few of the pictures of what's going on 

It was a little too sunny to take great pictures, but here's a few attempts.

The lovely chives on the left.

A terrible picture of our asparagus we cut this weekend. Any tough ends went to some very eager hens. Now we'll just wait patiently for new stalks to pop up where we cut these down. One already is from the cut I did last week. It's much larger too, SO happy we're finally doing the asparagus right!

Strawberries are flowering : ) We've got wild and planted strawberries all over the place in our yard. These are right next to the pea box. Hopefully, since its all fenced off those pain in the butt rabbits and deer won't get them this year!

Just a few more days and we will have ripe, red strawberries all over the place. What better way to take a break than snacking on strawberries fresh of the plant?

Above is our enormous oregano plant. It's sort of growing out of control at this point. Good thing we use a lot : ) 

If not we've got great plans to dry some out and use it all winter. Maybe next year we'll get around to controlling it some

Some of our tallest pea plants. Conveniently half of them were ruined by our adventurous pullets. But, we've still got a few dozen plants growing! Lotsa pea coming soon.

Just a few more days and we will have the beginning of our frutis and veggies.

Fall Activities part 1

Well we had TONS of great veggies and fruits this summer. What we don't grow ourselves, we buy as local as possible. I'm talking road stands around the corner. There are some great secret spots down by us with inexpensive, organics that you can buy in bulk. We go a little crazy with freezing and canning these delicious treats.. Tomatoes, salsa, peaches, apples, tomato sauce, apple sauce, and grape jam are all canned throughout the year. We have eggplant, asparagus, broccoli, eggplant, peaches, beans, peas, and leafy greens frozen. Good thing we got a bigger chest freezer!

 One of our batches of peaches

 Top left shows most of our canned goods. The other two pictures were random baskets we picked this summer for meals. It's hard to not miss these days. Fresh berries, still warm from the hot sun.. Crisp peas, a pepper you can bite into like an apple, cucumbers you don't even have to wash to enjoy! Who can beat that!? My mouth is watering just thinking about all the great tastes of summer!

Mum saved lots of seeds from our garden for next year. All of our melons did wonderful this past season.

 Jen invited mom to sell a few things at a nice event at her work. She set up a table, took local apples, honey, and apple sauce. We brought one of our dogs, met interesting people, and really enjoyed ourselves. There was also a great group called Howling woods farm. They rescue and care for wolves and wolf hybrids. It was very informative and we got contact with these amazing creatures!

 This wasn't our best summer for being on top of our garden.. I know this, but it was still a beautiful garden. Here's two shots of different angles. The first shows a line of our enormous sunflowers all lined up against the chicken pen. When these started to die the chickens would fly up and pull the flowers down. They absolutely LOVE the seeds. 

Sunday Morning Surprise

Hello hello!
On this unusually hot (at least as of late) Wednesday I figured I would share a little love with everyone...
This past Sunday we woke to wonderful surprise when we wandered out to feed the animals. To start, I must mention we have two very very bad hens who just refuse to stay in their pen. The one, a plymouth rock seems to have been laying eggs in our horse pen. Well the few times our easter egger rooster got out seems to have been sufficient. That's right! We have brand new chicks!

There are only three little ones, but aren't they too cute?

All three are black and two have little white dots on their heads. Fingers crossed they turn out to be all hens that we can keep for laying!

Another fun thing this weekend was the watermelon Mom finally decided to crack open.. Check out how big and beautiful this was! Everyone enjoyed it, and conveniently we still have at least 6-8 more out in the garden : )

Gardening on this lovely Tuesday off

What a beautiful, HOT day today! Just came in for a quick lunch and wanted to post a nice update of our wildly growing garden. We picked some of our greens and some of our delicious (out of control) snap peas. Yum!

  We spent a few hours out there this morning cleaning up a bit. Boy were there some weeds! If we're being honest though, there still are quite a few out there. I was trying to do things one space at a time while Mom ran around pulling weeds where ever she walked. I'm not sure who was more efficient.. But here's my wheelbarrow full of weeds for our very spoiled hens. 

Took a few pictures of our lush garden while I was out there to share. It's hard not to be excited about all of the veggies just starting to show up on each plant.

a little bitty eggplant coming in

A few of our quickly growing squash

 And last but not least, my favorite, the clematis with one of the violets we transplanted in the fall.

Hope everyone is staying cool and enjoying these nice summer days. Stay hydrated!

End of May update

The front yard, blooming beautifully

It's about time we update about the produce we have going on here.. This week is one of the last for fresh Jersey asparagus. Hurry down to get some! Next week, or maybe even this weekend, we plan on getting some Jersey strawberries in!

We cleaned up and banded some of the asparagus to sell today if you need some. But, don't worry, whatever we don't sell we'll eat, and anything we don't eat we freeze for winter. We aren't ones for wasting produce this good& it sure is great to have some asparagus in the fall or winter.

Here's Luna helping out with the packaging.

Also, on this very warm day on the farm I figured I'd snap some shots of the garden for everyone to see.. Can't wait for tomatoes right from the vine.

Our delicious greens

A couple of the potatoes plants

Strawberries looking very nice

Tomato plant coming up nicely

 One of the most beautiful flowers blooming beautifully, the clematis. Hard not to enjoy such a lovely time of year: