Mmm!!!

Watermelon in the Weeds

The house smells so good right now!  I got a box of peaches this weekend and spent yesterday making three batches of plain and spiced peach jams.  I have been slow cooking spiced peach butter since yesterday afternoon and so the whole place smells like wonderful.

I just finished picking more plums and filled both my steamer juicers to get them going after breakfast is cooked.  I'll have one batch of golden plum juice and another of red plums.  I'll turn these into jellies.  Sweetheart turned my last several batches of plum juice into wine.

I am even thinking I may try to layer the different colors in a few jars.  Wouldn't that be pretty?   I want to also make some jams with the plums as well.  I've been told I can just cook the plums and skim out the pits.

I may even try drying them, but may just wait until the free-stone plums are ripe for that.  The wild plums aren't much bigger than a cherry.  I do not want to take the time to cut out the pits.  I'll also pick more on Friday to sell at the Market this weekend.  They sell well!

It's funny because in our town no one would buy them as they grow like weeds around here.  But a few towns north, I can sell them for $2.50 a pint basket!  Works for me.  In fact, a few people I knew from town stopped by the market last week and we all laughed about me selling them.   

One apple tree is ripe and I have a basket of apples to do something with and lots more to pick.  The boys pick up the fallen apples each morning for me.  I think I need to send them to the front yard today to get all the pears on the ground as well.  All the pears and apple trees have bugs of some type, but I just cut around the bad parts.  It takes a lot of time, but since we are blessed with all this *free* fruit, I can't bare to let it go to waste this year!

 Last year, with Buttercup the cow and all the rest going on I hardly canned a thing.  I am doing much better this year and have a long ways to go.  I actually got excited yesterday about all I can make with what we have growing.  This is so good, because to be honest, I had simply been dreading it.  I looked through my two canning books and found a few new things to try.  I've got all sorts of recipes now and think I'll be busting through a bunch of batches of chutneys this month.  The Curried Apple Chutney I made a few years ago was so good.  I have plum and pear chutneys to try as well!

I haven't made any pickles yet as I have been waiting on them to GROW in the garden.  Alas, I must simply call another farm this week and ugh, BUY, them.  We must have pickles though!  :)  I personally can take them or leave them, but everyone else loves them.  Of course, now that I have my blue ribbon for pickles from the fair this year....

 I loved this quote I read yesterday,

“I enjoy doing housework, ironing, washing, cooking, dishwashing. Whenever I get one of those questionaires and they ask what is your profession, I always put down housewife. It's an admirable profession, why apologize for it. You aren't stupid because you're a housewife. When you're stirring the jam you can read Shakespeare.”
― Tasha Tudor

Yesterday was Tasha's Birthday.  I had hoped to pull together a post, but ran out of time.  I didn't read Shakespeare whilst stirring the jams, but I did watch Charles Dickens' David Copperfield while I canned.  The recent version with Maggie Smith is delightful!  For reading, I am working through Dickens'  Martin Chuzzlewit and Jane Austen's Mansfield Park.  I couldn't see how to read and peel peaches without ruining my books.  :)

Well, that's all for now.  We're just busily putting up all this bounty we are blessed with.  Hopefully, I can come up with more interesting things to write about soon.