End of the Season

My second peach tree performed amazingly this year. And I was even patient enough to wait until the fruit was truly ripe before picking it. Last year I picked it a week or two too soon and those peaches would not let go of their skins, no matter how long I scalded (cooked) them. This year I waited until they were falling off the tree. Mmmm. This is a great tree, but it does ripen late for Utah. It's an O'Henry peach tree. If you want another really wonderful peach variety, get yourself a Reliance peach tree. They come much earlier and eating a Reliance peach is like eating peach cotton candy. They are so peachy and sweet, and they just melt in your mouth. O'Henry peaches are great for canning because they're a much firmer peach. Anyway, I've given loads of peaches away (since I got 90 quarts of peaches last year and haven't nearly gone through those), and I'm trying my hand at peach freezer jam and peach jelly. We're into this three batches of jelly and four batches of freezer jam. Yay! I'm even trying something I heard from an older sister in my ward, who has been preserving fruit for Low These Many Years. She washes them thoroughly, splits them and takes the pit out, and then slaps those peaches back together and freezes them whole. We'll see how that goes. I have a cookie sheet of them waiting for the freezer. Making the jam and jelly has been a time-consuming process. I think it took me all day yesterday to get through two batches of freezer jam, even though I was doing them at the same time, because I kept getting phone calls and needing to run errands...oh, and there was a bunch of piano teaching and parent-teacher conferencing in there too (kids are doing great, BTW, which is always a relief to hear!). I think I finally got the jam into the plastic containers last night around 9 p.m.

My next project is to go out to the garden and see what I can rescue from my tomatoes. I have had them covered (with three bedsheets and one bedsheet-size piece of plastic), but I think I see dead tomato plant through some side openings. Hopefully I haven't lost the ripening tomatoes inside. And I think I'm also going to pull in a couple of begonias and see what I can do with those. They were so pretty over the summer in a flower pot on my porch. I'm also trying to bring in my marjoram, three cucumber plants (why not try the greenhouse thing and do the pollinating myself?), and a lemon grass plant to nurse along through the winter.

Well, time to get back to the last batches of jam and jelly. Sigh. I'm going to just look at them for awhile before I put them into the storage room (the jelly, I mean).