Pears, pears everywhere!

We picked a huge plastic box full of pears about a week and a half ago. No surprise, they are all perfectly ripe right now. We can’t eat them or can them fast enough! But as I’m the queen of overachieving, I made a go of it!

Today I canned 10 lbs of pears (10 jars) and made two batches of pear butter (12 lbs)! I lost count of the jars. I lost one, it exploded in the final hot water bath and made a huge mess.

I love that our home provides food for us, but it is so exhausting! I feel really bad though when the fruit goes bad before I can use it. Serious guilt! I also found 13 jars of preserves from last year’s harvest!

Fall Harvest

I’ve been feeling a lot like a pioneer woman lately. I have been making jams, butters, apple pie filling, and canning pears. I tried to start slow to save stamina for the end of the fall fruit harvest, and well, now that is here. More and more pears are falling from the tree, which tells me that they are extra ready to come off. So today I enlisted some help. That is a huge Tupperware bin full of pears and a few apples that were hanging on!

My bold and fearless helper trying to learn the knack of picking the fruit that is really high up. Last year the pear tree got so tall that we decided to cut it back, but it still feels pretty tall! The fruit at the top is usually the best quality, although the squirrels have left their mark on a few.

Picking the fruit at the top is annoying because you can only get one fruit at a time, and unless you have multiple poles (which we don’t) only one person can pick at a time. It is helpful to have a helper that can stand a bit away to grab the fruit off the picker.

This tree is absolutely beautiful and filled with fruit. We have already been eating fresh pears for about a month, and canned 6 jars, with 5 jars of pear butter. I also made 2 batches of apple pie filling and a half gallon of applesauce from the apples on our sad recovering apple tree.

There I am! Grabbing the pear from the picker! And doing the photography! Don’t worry, I did some picking too. It takes more muscle that it looks, to aim and lift the pole in just the right place to snap the pear off and drop it into the picker. My abs and shoulder feel like they got a workout!

There is the sad apple tree. It had a major injury a few years ago, and last year literally broke in half. I cried as we sawed off the effected bits and cleaned up the half grown apples. This year I tried to thin it out early. It worked a little. My goal for next year is to try to get the pests under control. The apples that did grow well, grew big and crisp. they had delicious flavor, but they didn’t look very good.

This is our Cherry tree. Jon bought it for me for mother’s day last year. We drove it home in the back of our mini van and planted it here… obviously it enjoyed some growth. I can’t wait for it to have cherries! I really thought we were going to get some this year, but we didn’t. It is supposed to have five varieties of cherries when it does make fruit. It also had beautiful blossoms this spring. All the trees blossom at slightly different times, but is ok because we get to enjoy them in different stages. Though it would be gorgeous to see them all in bloom at once!

The gods of comprehensive distance learning gave us the gift of Wednesdays. On Wednesdays all the kids have one zoom period and the rest of the day is “work”. Today it was a gift, but it might be more of a curse later as they have more complex work to do. Anyway, I will take it. Chasing around all the kids to make sure they are in the correct zoom at the correct time is a full time job, and I don’t really appreciate it. I hope as they get more used to it, it gets easier.

Backyard Oasis

Our backyard oasis is a work in progress. That said, right now it’s pretty awesome. Yesterday I spent my entire day out on the porch. Mostly because the sun was alluring and I know that in a few days, I have to go back to work. So while soaking up a little sun, under my sun sail, I decided to finish a project I have been itching to complete.

Somehow water got under our “waterproof” table covering, consequently, the finish flakes off and some is the boards swelled a bit. So I sanded and stain and oil treated and polyurethane sealed our table. Between coats, I worded on my current crochet project. All while enjoying this lovely day in my backyard oasis!

Our new Cherry tree and my tint yellow pear tomato plant. It’s the only veggie that I’m going to invest in this year.

I planted these strawberry plants last year, but I wasn’t sure if they would come back in a box. Well, they did and they look even better than when I planted them!