Last weekend, quite unexpectedly, became a peach canning weekend. Our sweet neighbor Emily has peach trees in her back yard and they are starting to drop their ripe fruit. They are dropping far more fruit than she can use. So, she gave us three bags of peaches! Then, the same day, my cousin Theresa and her family came to visit and brought with them a flat of . . . . peaches! So, we had lots and lots of peaches.

I made peach bread pudding. Mom made peach cobbler. And we still had a ton of peaches.

All of the peaches were freestones, so they could be easily halved. Now, we have made peach jam, and spiced peach jam, and stone fruit jam, but I had never canned peaches. So, I decided we should can the peaches. I had no idea it would entirely take over the kitchen and use every single large bowl we owned.

Between the weighing, sorting, blanching, the ice bath, halving, peeling, and pitting, it was quite an undertaking. Raven did the blanching and ice bath while I sorted, cleaned, and weighed the peaches. Then we both did the peeling and pitting. Even Mom got in on that once we moved to the dining room table where there was space for three people.

Then it was just putting them in jars with their syrup and a hot water bath for half an hour. We ended up with 11 pints and 1 quart of canned peaches from the 12 pounds of peaches we started with.

We haven’t opened up a can of our peaches yet, but they look tasty (except for the quart jar. There were only blue quart jars at the store, and orange peaches in blue jars look green, so not as tasty and tempting as clear glass jars).

We’re going to take a few jars over to Emily, since they are her peaches after all. We also still have peaches, and are likely to get more, since Emily’s trees still have a lot of peaches on them and one of the neighbors we pass on our run has an extremely productive peach tree and she has given us several bags and boxes of peaches in previous years. Her peaches are cling though, so those would be for jam rather than canning. Oh darn, canned peaches and peach jam for the winter.