Peaches and Maters

On a recent trip down to the garden, I noticed some beetles had moved into our peach tree and were clustered around some of the peaches by the hundreds. Fearing a whole scale invasion, we decided to pick a five gallon bucket full of peaches even though they weren't quite ripe and just ripen them the rest of the way at home. A few days later, they were nice and ripe and I canned 16 pints of them. 

The old peach tree is a clingstone variety meaning the pits are difficult to remove. As a result, the peaches aren't show quality but I've always felt that their taste is superior. You may not want to serve them in a bowl cold to guests but they work well in pies and cobblers and that sort of thing. Our new peach tree we planted is a freestone variety where the pit comes right out. I'm hoping with modern genetics, that perhaps the taste difference has been rendered a non-factor. The few I ate earlier after planting it seemed to taste really good. Time will tell for sure.

This photo taken a week later shows that our tomatoes are finally starting to ripen. Above is nearly 20 gallons of mostly Amish paste tomatoes that we picked which comprises a tiny tiny tiny fraction of all the green tomatoes out there. As I type this, I'm in the process of cooking all those down to hopefully start canning them later today or tomorrow. This will be a two or three day routine every week for awhile until I get all my canning jars full and then I will be giving them away if possible.

Earlier this summer, I wrote about hearing that you are supposed to thin out peach trees heavily loaded full of fruit so that the peaches that grow will be bigger and nicer. I attempted to do that but gave up because I felt I was just throwing perfectly good fruit away when I wasn't sure I would even get a crop to reach maturity. Well after picking a lot of the peaches the week before due to the beetle infestation, we found the remaining peaches left untouched by the beetles were indeed much bigger this week and were almost regulation size. So their is definitely truth to thinning out the peaches. 

Our baskets are full of various other things too and I'm not sure what I will do with them all. I may try some lime pickles after seeing Jeff making some on his blog and remembering eating them as a kid at family reunion meals. My mom never made them and so I have never made them. The bigger peaches will probably be made into a pie/tart/cobbler or perhaps all three. But all that right now is secondary until I get free space on my stove from all the bubbling pots of tomatoes that are on it right now.