Peaches!

Saturday I ran to Detering Orchards and purchased 75 lbs of peaches during their Peach Daze event.  The 25 lb boxes worked out to be about $1.10/lb.

Last night, Trudi, Marian, and I tackled canning them. I set up a single burner camp stove on the porch for additional burner space.  It wasn't terribly effective- it worked but took quite a while to get up to temperature between loads.

Marian worked on scalding the peaches.

Trudi and I pealed and sliced them.  Trudi was better at the slicing so I pealed and pitted while she sliced and then I stuffed the jars.  It was really messy work.  The peaches were juicy and the juice ran off the plastic table covering on to the floor (or rather the towel I'd put down on the floor to help mop up the mess).  It covered the table and ultimately, I don't think there were many places in the kitchen that weren't sticky with peach juice.

When we had all the jars stuffed with peaches and a batch in each of two canners,  we went and sat in the hot tub for a while.  That was the first of our "Goldilocks" events for the night- when we finished, I had only two empty pint jars remaining in the house.

When the timer rang after 25 minutes, we went back to filling jars with light syrup (0.5:2).  The second Goldilocks event of the night was realizing the propane canister had run out just as the timer had finished on the water bath. We were obviously all tired, so they needed to head home.  Before they left, they put syrup in all the jars so all I had to do was put them in the water bath.  That was our third Goldilocks event-The last jar used the last of the syrup to fill it to the top.

I think they headed home about 10:00 pm.
I finished the last water bath at 1:00 am.  There are 67 pints and all but two of them sealed over night.  I thought a peach crisp sounded good and now I have two jars to use that way tonight.  Everything in the kitchen is still sticky, although I did run a mop over the worst of the floor last night.  I left the dishes until this morning and I'll need to hand wash the canners and larger bowl tonight.  I am pleased with the results and super happy to have canned peaches again- I ran out this year and the store canned peaches are horrid.