That many berries would cost five bucks at the store, and I think there's something like ten more baskets like that to come in the future judging by what still remains on the plants. Everyone in the family is crazy for berries, so we need these to keep us from going broke.
Next we were headed for the peach tree, where we knew there was a lot of work to be done, but my wife noticed that the grapes we were ready. We changed course, and picked all the grapes off our vine. We got a lot more than we'd expected.
These grapes are pretty much only good for juice, and I don't think we'll get more than a cup out of them, but still, that's cool, right?
On to the peaches. My wife said it was a bumper crop this year, because of the favorable weather this spring and summer. Our tree is only two years old, and yet it's already producing like this.
I can't imagine what it'll be like when it's full-grown. Look at how many peaches we pulled of the tree:
And that's just one tree. There's still some more on the other tree.
Our tomatoes were getting ripe, so we went to pick those. For some reason our cherry tomatoes always produce much more prolifically than our regular ones.
When we were done, there were only a few big ones, but the bowl was overflowing with the little ones. Not all of them could even fit in the bowl.
My wife was all set to get canning on the peaches. She took in the one smaller container we'd put peaches in, and I grabbed the big one. It was super heavy, and so overflowing that the peaches on the top kept falling off onto the ground as I walked. I had to stop and retrieve at least three of them the basket was so overloaded. That should have set off warning signals in my head, and I'll make sure that it does in the future, because tragedy struck when I reached the second level of our rock wall.
Yeah, the handle on the basket snapped off, and all the peaches tumbled out onto the rocks. They were perfectly ripe and ready to eat, so taking a tumble like that was disastrous. I'd say at least a third, and possibly a half of the peaches sustained some serious damage, like this one:
I was so frustrated. Our bounty had become a bust. When I told my wife, she was ashen with grief...or maybe that was just because she was feeling sick. I had a hard time knowing. She didn't want to hear my report of the carnage, though. It made her too sad. But look at the carnage! It's like the asphalt after a serious car accident.
That little white plastic piece on the ground is the broken basket handle. I sure wish I'd realized it couldn't take that kind of weight. My wife figured that there was enough undamaged peaches to still can a bunch. The mushy stuff could be used for jam. All was not lost. I went off to work not feeling quite so bad about my disaster.
When I got home, I saw that she had been hard at work all day.
She'd canned dozens of bottles of sliced peaches already, and they looked great. I think she'd frozen some other slices too. Don't know if she made it to the jam or not though. She was sleeping when I got home, so I couldn't ask. Needless to say, we're going to be all set for peaches this year, and possibly some other stuff too, like tomato sauce and whatever you make with tomatillos...that creamy salad dressing that my wife always orders at the Mexican place, maybe? We've got a lot of those tomatillos as well.
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