Happy Harvest!

I decided that in honor of this fine Fall weather, I should do a blog about all the wonderful harvesting we've been doing this year! Recently, we had a feast of all the yummy things we've been making... Each is being marketed under the name "Bergstrom's Best" as affectionately named by Drew. Witness Bergstrom's Best Applesauce, pickles and peach jam! Each was a labor of love and each has it's own special little story...

It all started with the pickles. The boys and I found canning cucumbers at the South Jordan Farmer's Market and decided we should give pickling a try. It was surprisingly simple!! Will and I did it one afternoon in all of about 30 minutes!



Another find from said farmer's market was popcorn! We actually popped it right on the cob! We just stuck the cobs in a brown paper bag and microwaved it for about 5 minutes, and VOILA! Popcorn on the cob! We all thought it was pretty dang cool!

Next came the peaches... meet Will, the original "Peach Thief"! Our backyard neighbors have a peach tree that BARELY reaches into our yard, and Will could not WAIT for them to be ripe enough for him to pick!

Here he is in action... he pushes a lawn chair up to the fence and tip-toes on top of the chair as he reaches his little arm over the fence to grab a peach. He often would stack trucks or tractors on the chair to get him an even better reach. It was too funny!

At lunchtime whenever I asked him what fruit he wanted, he would just say he'd take care of it and then run outside and pick himself a peach!

Well, after all this thievery, imagine my happiness when one of my WW members brought me a HUGE bag of peaches fresh from her tree! I told her about my stealing son and rushed home to share the abundance with Will. We decided to make peach jam with all the peaches and went straight to work. We made a TON of jam and Will was a big help. He'd cut up the peaches after Jeff and I peeled and pitted them. We had peaches all over our kitchen! Well, lunchtime happened in the midst of our jam making and guess what my sweet Will did? He went outside and stole a peach off the neighbors tree!! I said, "Will! Why did you take it off their tree when we have a kitchen full of peaches right here?" And he just shrugged. I decided he just liked the freedom of picking his own peaches!

So it was no surprise that both boys were ELATED when I told them we were going to head to Wasatch Mountain State Park in Midway, Utah to go apple picking! Something about picking your own fruit is just an exciting thing for a kid.

The folks at the park were super nice and they let us each have our own apple picking tool. It was like a rake with a basket attached, so we'd stick the long stick as far as we could up in the tree until we had an apple in the teeth of the rake part, then we'd just yank it down and ta da! There would be an apple in the basket part. It was so fun! This is us with our apple picking tools.

Here are the fruits of our labors. Beautiful little "Heirloom" apples. We picked 10 pounds of them off 100 year old trees. Very cool! They were pretty little apples, but they were no good for just eating. They were way too sour!

So Jeff and I turned the sour apples into applesauce (the best applesauce I've ever tasted!)! We did our first batch by hand with regular old kitchen tools, but it was way too much work and we couldn't imagine having to do it with all 10 pounds of apples! Thankfully, my friend lent us her fancy-dancy Pampered Chef apple-peeler-corer-slicer tool and we were able to make 3 times as much applesauce in half the time! (Thanks Tracee!)

So that's how happily we've enjoyed this harvest. I don't know if you remember last year around this time, but I blogged on here about what a failure I am at gardening... Well, this year, I took a different route and decided to rely on the gardening skills of others instead, and I have to say that this year's harvesting experience has been MUCH MUCH happier!!