Peaches

I’m so happy that our peach trees are producing this year. You’ll remember that we got zero fruit last year. It’s a lot of work getting the fruit preserved. We have five peach trees but thankfully, they get ripe at three, maybe four different times. One of them is new this year so I’m not exactly sure when those peaches will be ripe but there aren’t a ton of them so whenever they get ripe, I’ll be fine with getting them processed.

We picked a lot of peaches – I can’t remember but seems like it was 30 gallons on Friday night before a storm. They weren’t totally ready to be picked but hail would have ruined them. They weren’t ripe yet so it was today when they started getting ready.

This first tree produces small, but sugary sweet peaches. Everyone who has freeze dried peaches has done it with the skins on. Works for me. I sliced up enough to fill the four trays of the freeze dryer and will get those started once the eggs are done.

I put 15 quarts of sliced peaches, with the skin on, in freezer bags and stuck those in the freezer.

I always peel peaches before making a cobbler but, feeling quite lazy, and overwhelmed with the amount of peaches I still have to process, I baked a cobbler and left the skins on the peaches.

I’m very happy to say that it seems like the skins melted away. I never tasted a skin so if they were there, after baking, they tasted just like the rest of the peach.

We were out of ice cream so I had to whip up some cream and add a bit of sugar for our cobbler.

Today, I’ll try to get the rest of those peaches processed. It’s a big job and we’re having sandwiches for our meal today. Can’t do everything!

As I was putting up those peaches yesterday I was very thankful that I had bought Fruit Fresh when I saw it at Walmart very early this year, and that I had a box of about 500 freezer zipper bags. I hardly ever use those and don’t even know why I had them but I’m happy I did!