Harvest

A few years ago we planted a peach and 2 pear trees.  We have been excitedly waiting for the year that they would produce!  We have been pruning little peaches off (which is so sad!  It's awful to just pull baby peaches right off and throw them away!)  But it's necessary for the remaining peaches to get nice and big, and also so the heavy peaches won't break the branches off the tree.

So you'll imagine my reaction when I looked out the window at our beautiful peach tree and saw this!

"Nooooooooooo!"

Bryan was out of town, and that dang branch was heavy but I knew I couldn't leave it like that.  I googled a bunch of youtube videos about how to fix broken branches and they said that quite often the branch can heal itself if you re-attach it quickly.  They suggested drilling a hole right in and then putting a big bolt with a nut on the other side to keep it together.  I didn't dare drill through it, but I just lifted the branch up and propped it up with a few 2x4s until Bryan got home a few days later.  He has re-attached it, but I guess we'll have to wait until next year to see if that branch lives.

That one branch had about half our peaches on it!  When we harvested all the peaches we were thrilled to get about 4 bushels from that one tree!  We ate them like crazy for a few weeks and then I bottled the rest (we still had enough to bottle 40 quarts!)  Yum!

Our pears also gave us a little harvest this year too.  Not as much, but hopefully next year we'll get more.  We got enough to bottle about 16 quarts.  We haven't really had a veggie garden the last 2 summers, and I've felt like a big slacker.  So, having these pears and peaches from our own trees felt good.