Peach Canning

I'm so excited that we canned our first peaches!!
Our day started early, by 8am my brood and I were outside Mood's Farm Market in Mullica Hill, NJ.  Sam, on the otherhand, wasn't ready to go anywhere until he'd had his 3rd breakfast of the day - so we kind of just hung out in the car for a bit...

Mood's Farm Market!!  Best farm market in South Jersey (my lil' ol' opinion)...

This was actually my first time at Mood's, but I absolutely love the whole atmosphere - the people were super nice and sweet, the fruits/vegetables were fresh, and the market had a real 'homey' feel to it.

Peaches! I ordered these "2nd" peaches the day before.  Apparently "2nd's" means that these peaches aren't pretty enough to sell to the public.  Can you believe they cost about 1/2 as much as the "pretty" peaches?!?! 2nd peaches are beautiful to me!!

Here's a picture of Marcia getting the bath water ready for our jars.  We are super excited about this bath water (we had to look up how to do it on the internet)!

Keeping Marissa busy crushing Vitamin C tablets for the ice water (to keep the peaches from browning after they were cut).

I've never had so many pots filled with water on my stove at one time!

So the directions called for us to boil the peach for 30 seconds, place it in ice water, and then peel.  But our peaches weren't ripe at all, so that method didn't work.  After awhile we just skipped the boiling water and skinned them straight from the box.

After a few hours of peeling (and talking... mostly talking), we got this far.  Then it was time for lunch and our kids were eyeballing our peaches just a little too much, so we took a break and went to Taco Bell (forgot my camera for the trip).

Our canning recipe book ontop our box of peaches...

The recipe called for 10lbs of peaches... but we don't have a weigh machine, so we kind of just eyeballed it and figured this was about 1/2 the box (I need a weigh machine!).

Eventually (eeeeeeeeeeeventually because there were lots of talking, laughter, and internet browsing after we got back from our lunch break), this is what our peaches looked like!

We packed the peaches into 6 one quart jars and added some simple syrup to them (I know what a simple syrup is now!).  We could only fit 5 one quart jars at a time, so this lonely guy was the last to go in...

Then Marcia wanted to experiment with some peaches... she made a peach tea (soooo good) and then wanted to try grilling a peach and eating with ice cream.

Marcia is awesome like that... she loves to experiment, plan parties, and LAUGH! We had a blast.

And our kids had fun too...

Here they are making our driveway more beautiful with their chalk art.

Our grilled peach... it was pretty good.  Though we think it will definitely be better once the peaches have ripened.

At the end of the day, we had a blast and canned some peaches while we did it.  And I do it all for these four.  I love them so much and am so glad that God has granted me to opportunity to stay home and learn how to be a homemaker for them and their father.

How blessed am I?

Yasmin