Summer of bounty

 This has been a summer of excess, in so many ways. After weeks of sub-zero weather and record snowfall, our spring was uncharacteristically mild. Brian brought peaches back from southern Oregon and we canned batch after batch. It's hard to describe to anyone who doesn't can the sore feet, sweaty limbs and sticky hands that come with it. We were hardly past that when we realized our two plum trees and apple tree were going to produce record harvests.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...the vegetables in the garden were doing strange things. The kale was trying to take over the planet while both beans and peas resisted repeated plantings. While the purple cabbage looked like something from a sci-fi movie, the squash was only so-so. So, extra squash planting and we're off to the races. Now it's hard to walk around the garden, because things have taken over the walkways.

We hovered over the plums because past experience had told us that they tasted best if left to ripen on the tree and once one started to ripen, they all ripened. And so it went. We picked plums in one marathon 3-hour session and ended with six large bushels of plums. Then, guess what? We had many, many, many plums. We canned. We jammed. We fruit leathered. We blanched and we dried. We put plums in a wagon and went door to door to the neighbors. We delivered box after box to the local food banks. And still we had plums. It was a plumapocolypse.

And we still have apples.