"Millions of peaches, peaches for me!"

We also helped ourselves to a bunch of mom & dad's peaches this weekend. Cole and I have talked about putting in some fruit trees in the coming years, but for the foreseeable future, we'll need to acquire our fruit elsewhere. The plan is to ultimately have pear, peach, apple, and cherry trees.

After a quick bout of canning last night, we wound up with seven quarts of peaches in light syrup, and one extra-special quart of peaches in a brandy-syrup concoction. Can't wait to try that one out!! We've got several fresh ones left for snacking on, too.

"You like tomato and I like tomahto..."

Our tomatoes didn't do quite as well as we were hoping this year. We planted five plum-type Roma tomatoes, which are really good for making sauce, and are supposed to come on all at one time. We only grew a few other, indeterminate-type tomatoes. All our tomatoes produced, but we never got that one huge deluge of ripe tomatoes all at one time that we were expecting. The plants grew pretty good, but seemed to dry up and turn around the bottom... they just never got healthy enough to produce a lot at once. This meant that for canning purposes, we had to supplement with tomatoes from mom & dad's garden.

We went out and picked for the second time out there on Saturday, and got quite a haul. We now have fourteen quarts of whole tomatoes and a few bags of frozen. We'll have to see how well this works. The plan is to use these whole tomatoes for chilis, sauces, or whatever as we need them. I'd like to do some tomato juice this week or next, and of course we need to can fresh salsa in the near future as well.