Peaches: because I can

Even though my new kitchen is shaped like a question mark and has the most . . . eclectic . . . configuration of shelves I've ever seen in a kitchen, even so, it turns out to be a pretty decent kitchen for canning purposes.  The fact that the dining room is right near by helps a lot, because the dining room accounts for 85% of the counter space in the kitchen anyway.

Oh, and I discovered in the process of trying to keep my jars warm that the oven is too small for my baking pans.  What's up with that?  Fortunately, the turkey pan fits -- not that we had to use the turkey pan for canning purposes, but I decided it would be good to check as long as I was futzing with the oven anyway.  

So, voila:  my first round of canned food in the new home!  I picked 75 pounds of peaches on Friday, and canned them up with my daughter and a friend on Sunday.  

A dozen jars went home with my friend. 
One jar didn't seal; these are the others, waiting for a bit of
a soapy wipe down before their trip into the basement. 
Aren't they pretty?

Even though I've been canning for a while now, though, I learned some good stuff.  One is: don't pick on Friday and then wait until Sunday to start canning.  Because the peaches were really ripe, and a bunch of them didn't make it all the way to Sunday . . . kind of spectacularly going bad, in fact. 

The other thing I learned is much more positive (more fruitful, so to speak):  a 5-gallon bucket holds 25 pounds of peaches, which makes approximately 12 quarts of canned peaches.  In the past, our family had used a wide variety of buckets and bushels and baskets, and I never quite knew how much we'd picked until it was weighed.  And it was only last year that I started keeping good records about where those peaches went (how many became jam, how many became canned peaches, etc).  This year, I picked exactly three 5-gallon buckets of peaches, which came out to 76 pounds.  The spoilage meant that we didn't quite can up 3 dozen quarts -- we were about 4 quarts shy.  But the conversion is close enough that in the future, if I decide I want a certain number of jars of peaches, I'll know just how many to pick when I go to the orchard.  How cool is that? 

Canning pots and buckets, rinsed out and drying on our back patio. 

It's a weird side-benefit of downsizing and getting rid of stuff.  We gave away so many of our specialty buckets that I only had the 5-gallon buckets left . . . and that turned out to make the whole tracking process a gazillion times easier.  Go figure.