The Fruits of Summer

Hello there!  My apologies for the lack of posts lately; things have gotten away from me a bit.  However, now I'm back and the blog has a new look - what do you think?  I wanted to go for a cleaner, more streamlined background to allow the eye to focus more on the content, and right now I kind of have a thing for grey and for chevrons.  Let me know if you think it works.

In the meantime, what have we been up to?  Let's see...

There was peach picking at a local orchard with our friends E and A...

The same farm also had berry-picking available, and Nick and I stayed after we were finished with peaches to add a few pints of fresh blackberries to our plunder.

What did we do with this beautiful fruit?  Other than baking peach cobbler and snacking on fresh berries, we indulged in some canning.  I am a canning novice, while A and Nick are more experienced.  She and Nick whipped up a batch of peach jam and one of peach preserves with a smidgen of ginger.  Nick and I decided we wanted more ginger kick, so we made another small batch of preserves with double the quantity of ginger - delicious!  Oh, and we made a few jars of blackberry jam too.  I'm hoping to make enough jam this summer to be able to give some of it as holiday gifts, but it's so tasty that we're going to have trouble not eating it all first!

More to come on what's been going on this month in upcoming posts.  Stay tuned!