Apples and Peaches!

While we were at the Promontory School dedication, DH's aunt asked someone at one of the fruit stands when the canning peaches would be ready.  She was told that they were about 10 days ahead of schedule so sometime in the next week to week and a half.  I have talked in the past about driving up to Perry to buy peaches for canning - they are some of the best around.  This year I was finally able to make it happen.  One morning I loaded Kay and MJ up in the car and headed north to Perry.  The first stand that I went to didn't have any at the time so I drove to another one down the road and bought 4 bushels of Early Elberta peaches - YUM!!  I unfortunately did not get a picture of them but when we were putting the peaches into boxes, MJ and Kay were helping me and every peach that MJ picked up she would smell and then she would say, "Mmmmm!!  Smells good!"

I then drove to my parents' house and we spent the next couple of days canning the peaches.  We had a few leftover that I made some peach ice cream and peach crisp from.  I also tried making a peach pound cake - which was alright.  We also had just some simple peaches and cream one night - sliced peaches with canned milk poured on them - surprisingly delicious!  (That's one treat that I had growing up.)

Before I canned any peaches though I spent several days at my parents' house canning applesauce made from apples off of our trees in the backyard.  One of our trees only produces apples about every 2nd or 3rd year for some reason and this year was one of the years.  The birds and squirrels were going crazy trying to eat the apples off of the tree so I picked all of them and then I had to do something with them.  (The funny thing is that we have another apple tree in our yard which is a Granny Smith tree and we get apples every year from it and the birds and squirrels don't touch the apples from it - they are too sour!)  The apples were not perfect.  Even though we tried spraying diligently for codling moth this year, we still got them on a lot of the apples.  Most of the apples were still mostly good though and we just cut out the bad parts.  The applesauce is delicious - nice and chunky and a little tart too!  One of the days that we made the applesauce, M&M was able to come too and help us out (this was before school started for her).

I week or so ago I picked the rest of the apples off of our Granny Smith tree.  I have about 8 plastic grocery bags full of apples waiting for me to do something with them.  It is amazing how many apples those trees can produce.  Hopefully next week I will be able to make more applesauce with them!  (And thankfully apples have a much longer shelf-life than peaches!)  I have tried drying some of the apples into apple chips.  They are really good but it takes a long time - a couple of hours in the oven and I can only do about 3-4 apples at a time.  Then once they are done we all snack on them and they are gone by the next morning!

Yummy half-eaten jar of applesauce!

Some of these apples are huge!