Hellllllooooooo Friday!

What a week it has been. You may have seen on the NOH Facebook page that we were up to our armpits in peaches last weekend. In fact, we harvest 100 POUNDS of peaches. That was all on two trees — and most of it actually came off of a single tree but the second tree is rather puny.

These are white peaches and they are all quite small. Which means that it can be rather tedious to work with them. Plus there were just so many. Lucky for us, our local market gets so much fresh produce every week that they have boxes upon boxes that they just burn every Monday when they’re closed. So since we were already there picking up some fresh veggies for dinner, we asked if we could have a few boxes.

Little did we know that we’d actually be using all ten flats that we brought home — plus another big plastic crate that we already had here on the farm. I will definitely keep the market in mind the next time we have a bunch of fruit to harvest…

And if you don’t quite know what 100 pounds of peaches looks like….

That photo barely does it justice. Just when we thought we were coming to the bottom of our canning, we realized there were still plenty more! Each of the cardboard containers hold about 10 pounds of fruit. We actually have about 10 pounds left that I want to bake with…and will also be making some popsicles with, using up the peach juice we also collected in this process.

I was really focused on wasting as little of the peaches as possible when we canned them. From the fruit ketchup recipe (which is really yummy), I used all the leftover pulp that you’d normally throw away by putting it into other recipes just for a bit more moisture and flavor. And as we created forty-four liter-sized jars of peaches in syrup, we also collected the peach juice which we used in iced tea over the weekend.

Besides all the peach mayhem, our garden is continuing to grow and sprout, and I was really excited to see lots of little seedlings popping out of the ground over the last couple weeks.

Brussel Spout Seedling

Since Mackenzie was so in love with the carrots fresh from the ground this summer, I planted lots of carrots this time around for her to munch on. And baby carrots in the fall are the sweetest and best anyway.

The little carrot seedlings popping up -- which Mack currently refers to as "grass"

The Asian and Italian salad mixes are really coming along. The Asian salads are supposed to be great for cooking in the wok as well so it should be interesting to see what ways we come up with for eating them when they’re ready….or if we even let them get big enough to eat that way. There never seems to be enough lettuce around here when we need it…

I’m actually a bit surprised that we still have so many strawberries — but I’m also not complaining. Not that I have gotten to eat more than two of them…but Mackenzie sure does love picking them and eating them. And I figure anything that encourages her to enjoy fresh fruits and vegetables is a worthy sacrifice in my book.

More of the red tomatoes are finally getting some color in them as well. I was starting to think I might need to make fried green tomatoes or something along those lines. I have no idea what sort of tomato this is, but it’s quite large now.

And our sunflowers are just lovely. The giants are quite as huge as I expected them to be, even the ones outside of the container garden…but they are awesome. And instead of all opening at once, it has been a very slow and gradual opening which is really nice for the enjoyment factor. Mackenzie loves to get up in the morning and check to see if any new flowers have popped.

Starting tomorrow, we will hopefully be able to harvest our grapes. We are SO GLAD that we didn’t have to harvest them last weekend with the peaches because, ugh, the peaches were already exhausting on their own. We’ll be making a whole lot of red wine with our grapes. And if it doesn’t turn out to be too daunting, I might try to get the Riesling grapes from our neighbors with the great garden because they hate them (they aren’t the type of grapes you’d want to eat from the vine) and don’t make wine themselves. I’m sure we could work out some sort of deal — such as we give them a bunch of wine in return.

Want to join in the garden fun and link to your own blog or images online? You can share about anything related to gardening, old or new posts, from recipes to harvesting to grow reports to DIY projects or inspiration.

Here’s how this works:

PLEASE READ THESE GUIDELINES, especially if you have never linked up before!

1. You are free to join the Garden Life link up at any time. You can also skip a few weeks and then come back. It’s entirely up to you.
2. Please link directly to a post about your garden, a recipe, a tutorial for gardening, an inspirational idea, etc that relates to GARDENING — not your main blog URL.
3. Please only link to your own blog or photos hosted online.
4. You MUST link back to No Ordinary Homestead or a Garden Life link up post in your blog post. This way, if someone else wants to join the fun, they can. You can either link with text or using the Garden Life badge.
   Below is a code for the badge above. Just copy and paste this code into your post or save and upload the image to your blog:
   <a href=”https://www.noordinaryhomestead.com/garden-life-link-up/“><img title=”garden-life-300″ src=”https://www.noordinaryhomestead.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/garden-life-300.gif” alt=”garden link up” width=”301″ height=”301″ /></a>
5. I highly encourage you to visit other participants and leave comments. This is a great way to meet new friends and become inspired about your garden! I try to visit all the blogs participating as well 🙂

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