Peaches

So, home-bottled peaches are one of the things I grew up with. My parents always had fruit trees and so they bottled peaches, pears, cherries, and apricots. So, I guess that's where I get my desire to bottle fruit when I get the opportunity. My Mom brought me a box of peaches from their tree last week and I have been thinking about all the reasons I love bottling peaches.

• We only have a turtle and a dog, so the opportunity to raise fruit flies in our house is wonderful! I love how they come in and reproduce on my plants and bananas that are sitting out so that we can keep a healthy colony in our home for weeks afterwards.

• The practice multi-tasking as I am boiling peaches - skinning and pitting them and taking any bad parts out, making the syrup, cleaning the bottles, boiling lids, putting peaches in jars, sealing the jars and marking the bottles is wonderful. How often do I get to do.. lets see... 8 tasks all at once? Obviously not enough.

• Having all 4 burners going on my stove top for like 6 hours straight does wonders for my electric bill. Not to mention the heat and steam that is generated during that time. Nothing like sweating profusely for hour after hour to clean out those pores!
  

• I get to see a physics process in the works as I watch sugar molecules spread from the container, to the stove top, to the floor, and then multiply and spread profusely throughout the house. Usually it is mixed with water or steam from the other tasks OR even better, the peach juice from the peaches. It is so much fun cleaning up that sticky mess because it can't be cleaned up in one mopping, it takes like 3 or 4.
  

• The excitement of a small explosion in your kitchen is so much fun! To have a glass jar filled with peaches and hot syrup burst is a moment worth waiting for. If you are as lucky as me, it may even happen 4 times or more!
  

• I love how when peaches are ready to bottle, they are ready NOW. You can't ask them to wait until next Tuesday when you have less going on in your schedule. They demand attention and time that moment, and well, I just don't have enough demands on my time as it is. It teaches me time management and flexibility.
  

• Teaching my kids how to put up fruit is such a joy! It is great having them in my kitchen eating the peaches, asking me all sorts of questions, throwing peaches into the cold water sink before boiling them so that I get to find the peach that doesn't belong, moving jars around just for the fun of it, tracking the sugar and juice over more of the house, and my favorite... getting a drink of milk and then pouring the rest of the cup into the sink of clean peaches so I get to start again.

• My disposal needs to chew up peach pits occasionally anyway to keep its blades sharp and clean. Plus, it is fun to reach your hand into a disposal filled with peach skins, slimy peach parts, and who knows what else to find a pit or part of a pit.

• Running to the grocery store several times in a few hours is fun too. There is always something I don't have enough of... lids, jars, sugar, pectin, etc. I like the game of figuring out how much I need, buying it, and then realizing how off I was to start with and doing it all over again!

• I am happy when I am woken in the middle of the night a dozen times or so to the sound of the jars sealing and lids popping. Every time I hear it, I think - thank heavens it pops loud enough for me to wake up and hear it so we can celebrate together! I think the jars want me to jump up and congratulate them on their accomplishment.

• The last reason I love canning is that it makes me feel like a true LDS woman - especially since I don't scrapbook. I think to really be a true LDS woman, you have to bottle something in your lifetime. It's like I am one step closer to my mansion!

Yum Yum!