Peaches, Peaches and More Peaches

Question: What happens when all the Church members in the St. George area fast for a bountiful harvest at the Church Orchard?

Answer: The Orchard ends up with more peaches than it knows what to do with!!

Yup, that's what happened. Last year I went to the Orchard with my dad after all the picking was finished for the cannery and picked some peaches of my own to bottle. It was great because we got the reject peaches (which are still really nice) for free!! I have been waiting all month for the Orchard to announce that they were finished picking this year so we could run back out. Sunday afternoon my parents called to tell me that the Cannery had too many peaches and was selling them for 35 cents per pound. I couldn't believe it! It wasn't as good as free, but we didn't have to do the picking or drive way out to Hurricane (which, for some unknown reason, is pronounced "her-uh-cun", by the way).

I went over to the Cannery on Tuesday morning with my bushel baskets and ended up getting 73 pounds of the biggest peaches I have every seen (softball size) for $25.00! Great price!! I didn't think it looked like all that many peaches. I took my 2 bushels back to our house, cleaned bottles and started evaluating. My canning book says that each quart bottle takes 2-3 pounds of peaches. Right then I knew I was in trouble!! I am now finished after having ran out of bottles and I have 21 quart bottles and 21 pint bottles full of peaches. I still have about 10 peaches we are going to have to eat in the next few days. But Bryan is happy because he loves peaches and we now have another year supply of them!