The First Fruits of the Harvest

This past weekend I got together with Kate over at the  Crafty Homestead and we made some fabulous peach jam.  The following day was the Peach Festival which my band plays at every year, and guess what we brought home?  Yup, peaches.  Emboldened by our success from the previous day, and now absolutely laden with peaches, Obo and I attempted a second batch.  The result?  Pictured above, we got jam which was a very different color – we used white donut peaches for the first batch – but tasted just as fantastic.  Yipee!

I’ve done a small bit of canning in the past, but really want to do quite a bit more this year in an effort to eat more food that we’ve produced ourselves. We still have enough peaches to make one more batch of jam, and I’m hoping the blackberries at our cabin in the Catskills will produce enough to let us make blackberry preserves. I’m hoping to get through most of the winter eating only jam and preserves that we’ve canned ourselves (PB & J is very popular in our household, so we go through a fair amount of the stuff).  I’ll be sure to share how far we get this winter or spring.