If you didn’t already know, my family and I try our hands at gardening every year. Some years are great, and other years we hardly get anything out of the garden. We usually always have green beans. In addition to our garden we have a few fruit bearing trees. We have 2 cherry trees, and a couple apple trees, and we have 2 peach trees. Recently our tiny 3-year-old peach trees put on the most fruit we have ever seen in our lives. They are contender peach trees. Normally they put on just a few small flavorful peaches, however this year they went nuts! We had piles of peaches! We ate some, gave some away, made peach preserves out of some and froze some. It seemed all that effort hardly made a dent in the supply of peaches we had!
So, I decided to can (or preserve) some. We usually can something every year. (Usually green beans). So, this year canning peaches was a little different. All together I canned about 14 quarts of peaches. Everyone kind of has their own way of canning. I just use the Ball Blue book of Preserving.
I used the raw pack method. First you peel the peaches, and cut into halves or quarters, and pit. Then you’re supposed to treat the peaches to prevent darkening or browning. To do this you add about 2 TBS of lemon juice concentrate for every 8-10 peaches and ½ teaspoon of sugar. We had pretty small peaches, so it was closer to 10 for us, or about 4 cups worth. (FYI, the lemon juice, and peaches together smell awesome, or at least I think so!) Next is packing the peaches into clean jars and making the syrup. I used a medium syrup which was 3 & 1/4 Cups of sugar and 5 Cups of water. You mix it together and heat it up until the sugar is dissolved. Then ladle it over the peaches leaving about ½ inch head space. If that is confusing refer to the diagram: here. Remove the air bubbles. I do this by shoving a wooden spoon in the jar all the way to the bottom. It is an important step, even though it doesn’t seem like it at the time. Your jars will have trouble sealing if you skip this step. Next clean the rim of the jars and place the lids and rings on them. (Some lids require that you boil them. The sure fit lids by Ball say to just wash and rinse them in warm water). The book says to process pints for 25 minutes and quarts for 30 minutes in a boiling- water canner. I did this for two rounds, and then we still had peaches left over. Ha!
Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed this small detour from photography.