Peaches This Year

I don't have time for a long post. I took almost the entire week off from my work preparing for our move to deal with our peaches. This week I have to get back on track with the stuff for the move.

Despite that, I did want to update you on the peaches this year. We harvested 57 pounds! What a great tree!

Peach jam cooling on the counter

Since this will be the last home grown peaches I have for awhile, I wanted to make sure I got as much jam as possible. I ended up with 23 pints. I found a recipe for peach peeling and pit jelly and made that with a gallon of the peelings and pits. That gave me 5 pints of jelly. So I feel pretty happy about the harvest.

Linking with Daphne's Dandelions for Harvest Mondays. 

Fruitfulness!

First harvest of peaches

Second harvest of peaches

More on the tree

I always love peach season! I have a Feliciano peach tree. This is a very early peach tree that produces well with low chill hours. Last year, I harvested 71 pounds of peaches from this wonderful tree. Last year was much colder and I began harvesting on May 2, 2014.

This year, I began harvesting Friday, April 24, 2015, but those first peaches were eaten immediately by my children and me, so there is no record of those.

I am very excited about the fruitfulness of this tree. The only bittersweet part of this is that my family has decided to sell our home. We are hoping to move to land. That's our goal. It's great to get more land, but leaving this tree is hard for me. It's a huge tree and would need a crane to remove it from the land.

I have a friend who is keeping many of my other plants until we can get settled into our land. She would be willing to plant it and keep it for me, if anyone knew of a way to save the tree for our future use. Thank you in advance for any advice.

I am happily linking with Daphne's Dandelions for Harvest Monday. I really appreciate her long-standing devotion to the community of bloggers on Harvest Mondays through out the years. It has been great to read about gardens, even when I am too busy to do much gardening.

Harvest Monday August 18, 2014

I have only been gardening for 3 years. Here is a picture of my first garden.

Yep. That was it. 3 four by four squares of soil. Wow, how times have changed. Here are a couple of pictures of it now.

I am grateful for all the posts people write for Harvest Mondays. I kept trying because of all those posts. Thank you to every person who has posted a Harvest Monday post. I read your posts and they have inspired me. And to Daphne, thank you for hosting it all these years.

Strawberries on the vine

A representative harvest basket from this week.

okra, green beans, strawberries, and lima beans in the harvest
basket

Linking with Daphne's Dandelions Harvest Monday.

Harvest Monday July 14, 2014

A big thank you to Daphne from Daphne's Dandelions for hosting Harvest Mondays!

Okra, cherry tomatoes, pears, and cucumbers

crushed tomatoes in their own juices

okra, cucumbers and cherry tomatoes

Pears

Here are some pictures from this week's harvests. The tomatoes are not from my garden. I went to a you pick place and bought enough to can some crushed tomatoes in their own juices.

Harvest Monday July 7, 2014

I am joining Daphne's Dandelions for Harvest Monday today. I want to send a big "thank you" to Daphne for hosting this event. It's fun. You can see what others are harvesting by going to the link.

It has been a pretty good harvest week for me. First up, I will talk about my pears. I gathered 2 baskets full. That's wonderful! I have had trouble with Japanese rust on that tree for the past few years, so it hasn't had fruit on it. There was a little Japanese rust this year, but someone told me that if I put Epsom salts under the tree to the drip line of the leaves every time it was getting ready to rain, it would help. I tried it, and it helped more than this expensive and hard-to-apply organic stuff I bought.

My mother-in-law really loves pear relish, so I made her nine pint jars from the first basket of pears. I have to dole it to her one jar at a time or she will eat so much of it she makes herself sick. I didn't grow up with it and it isn't my favorite, but it makes her happy.

Pear relish to the left and a basket of pears to the right. 

Pears. You can see a little of the Japanese rust on the very top
pear.

Pear relish

 Then, I made 2 quarts of spiced pear sauce.  I added 1 1/2 cups of brown sugar, cinnamon, ginger, and a ground cloves. YUM! I think it is good enough to eat as a dessert. :)

Spiced pear sauce (like apple sauce, but with pears)

I don't have the best luck with corn, but this is better than the first time I grew it. We got four edible sized ears today and have about 8 more in the garden.

corn

The okra is coming in pretty well. It's just getting started, so it should hit its stride pretty soon. We all love it and are happy to be eating it again.

Stewart's Zeebest okra

 My son is in a 4-H Junior Master Gardener program. It's been a great experience for him. He planted 9 hot peppers in the garden, because of the class. We weren't sure that we would get anything off of them, because they looked very poorly for a long time, but they are bouncing back and we got our first hot pepper this week. He has several different types of hot peppers, so I hope he can at least taste all the different ones. Maybe he will become a chili head! He's only nine and really loves spicy, so we will see.

Hot banana pepper

 The cucumbers are providing us with tasty cucumbers every day. I have squash vine borers on the cucumber plant (argh!), so I don't know how long we will be able to get them, but I am going to enjoy every one that we can get. They taste so wonderful!

cucumbers

And last, but not least, the swallow tailed kites are back in town! Out whole family just loves these birds! They are relatively rare birds in much of the country and several states have them listed as endangered and/or threatened. We love to watch them swoop, soar and dive. And as a bonus, they eat a lot of snakes. It is so neat to see them carrying a snake through the sky, holding it by the middle, both ends of the snake flying behind them like a banner. 

swallow tailed kite behind our home

71 Pounds of Peaches!

I stored the peaches in the garage to finish ripening,
to lay them flat and to keep them out of the way
while I worked on other peaches.

The picture above is the only one I took of the wonderful, amazing beautiful harvest of peaches my 3 year old tree gave me. Before it was over, that 8 foot table was covered with peaches, even though
I was peeling, cutting, removing seeds and processing about a basket-full a day.

All told, it took me almost 2 weeks to completely process 71 pounds of peaches. I would work on them at the table every day for as long as I could stand it. My hands got sore and crampy from peeling and cutting that many small peaches. My shoulders cramped from sitting in basically the same position for hours at a time. Thank goodness I had Young Living Panaway and Young Living Stress Away. I used Young Living Panaway on my hands to relieve the cramping and I used the Young Living Stress Away to get rid of a massive headache I got from sitting in that one position for hours on end. (And I do mean massive. The headache was one that 2 Aleve normally wouldn't touch. Stress Away relieved it in less than an hour.)

peach jam

I ended up with 3 pints of peach-pineapple jam with almond extract (totally yum!), and 13 pints of peach jam, and 5 really full gallon bags of frozen peaches. And the whole family ate peaches all day long for the last two weeks.

I am really happy about this, because this is the first harvest for me that really feels abundant. I have been grateful for every harvest I have ever gotten, but I would read other blogs and think, "That isn't how it happens here." So I am really glad for something that feels abundant.

You can see what others are harvesting at Daphne's Dandelions Harvest Mondays.

**I do distribute Young Living Essential oils. If you are interested, you can sign up through this link.

Harvest Monday November 18, 2013

I am thankful for Daphne and Harvest Monday's. It is so great to read what is going on in other people's gardens. And it is great to get to share with others what is going on here.

We had our first killing frost this week. This seems early to me, but it may be because I have only gardened for three years. The last three years there have been no frosts before December. (I checked the Frost Date Map for Alabama and it says that our average first frost date is November 21 to 30, so I guess I was right.)

I didn't have much in the garden, since I am not doing a fall garden this year, but there was one volunteer tomato plant. I was hoping that it would have time to ripen, but the frost came. So I made green tomato pickles (from the Ball Complete Book of Home Canning). This is one of my family's new favorite recipes. I made it many times during the summer, when we had a glut of cherry tomatoes. It was easier to just pick them green and make this fantastic recipe than to try to figure out what to do with them after they ripened.

This time, I had enough to make three quarts, using jars I got when I just happened to be a the right place at the right time.      I am so excited about these pickles. We had almost used up the ones I had previously put up.

See what others are harvesting at Daphne's Dandelions.

Feasting Visually

As I mentioned in an earlier post, we had LOTS of rain this summer. This made my garden produce less than in previous years. I haven't posted many times to the Harvest Mondays. There just wasn't much to report.

I have thought a lot about this post and whether I should write it. But this is the way I decided it. I do have a butterfly garden. We planted it last fall, when my children and I were studying insects for science. And it has been extremely productive for our family this year.

It has produced a feast for the eyes, and full of amazing transformations. We have been simply enraptured watching these interesting creatures.

We saw the mama Gulf Fritillary lay the eggs on the passion fruit vines. Soon afterwards, we saw the first instars of the caterpillars.

Do you see the orange caterpillars among the vines?

Then larger and larger caterpillars. Finally, we started to see this.

Chrysalids from Gulf Fritillary butterflies. Suffice it to say that
they are about an inch apart all along the roofline for 20 or 30 feet. 

Finally, we started seeing some of them emerging. One day, we watched 15 emerge in a single morning!

Chrysalids of Gulf Fritillary butterflies with a couple emerging
butterflies.

We still have many chrysalids, and now our front yard is alive with the movement, the fluttering of butterflies.

Gulf Fritillary on Porter Weeds

It has been wildly successful for us. And some of the plants I planted for the butterflies have also attracted hummingbirds. The porter weed (above) draws hummingbirds even in the pouring down rain.

So, you see, even though I haven't harvested much food from our garden, we have all benefited from the harvests in the butterfly garden.

Hop on over to Daphne's Dandelions and see what others are harvesting.

Harvest Monday Labor Day Edition

This has been an excessively rainy this summer. From July 1st to August 18 (when my rain gauge broke) I recorded 23.5 inches of rain in my own backyard. This has not been positive for the garden. Almost everything rotted and/or molded.

I had planted okra and Mississippi Cream peas for summer crops. Both of these plantings hung in there through the excessive rainfall. But neither one produced much.

I tried 3 types of okra this year. From left to right: Eagle Pass,
Stewart's Zeebest and Stelley.

Now that the rain has returned to a more reasonable level, I am getting some okra and a little Mississippi Cream peas.

I wanted to taste several different types of okra. My family really likes okra. Last year I grew Clemson Spineless, but I wanted an okra that would taste good at a larger size than finger length. I was also looking for something that would bear more prolifically than the Clemson Spineless did. (And, let's be honest, everybody grows Clemson Spineless. I wanted something a little different.)

All three have a good flavor. My middle daughter just loves the shape and size of Eagle Pass. When they are cut crosswise, they look like little stars. The Stelley (at the right) has not been very productive in the deluge of rain. In fact several of the Stelley plants died. 

The Stewart's Zeebest plants all lived through the summer. They produced a little and kept going. None of the plants were as happy as they would have been with less rain, but the Stewart's Zeebest was the star performer in my garden. The pods in the middle were the size I always picked the Stewart's Zeebest, and without fail they were tender and tasty. They were also much more productive than either of the other plants, and much more able to withstand the testings the weather gave us.

I will definitely grow Stewart's Zeebest again. I want to thank Dave from Our Happy Acres. He grew them last year and reported it to Harvest Monday's.  I am very grateful that he reported his experiences with this plant. It is just what I wanted for my own garden, and I would never have thought to plant it if he had not had such glowing things to say about it.

I am linking with Harvest Mondays, hosted by Daphne from Daphne's Dandelions. Hop on over and see what others are harvesting.