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.

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.