Everything is Peachy Keen!

Peaches! Tons and tons of peaches..well..maybe not tons but a lot of peaches! Son and I chopped what seemed like an endless amount of the fruit today. I had to use the canner pot to cook the chopped peaches. It was filled to capacity even though it is almost a twenty-two quart pot! Oh my! The house smelled delicious while this was cooking! It took us several hours, two cut thumbs and a pot of coffee to make our way through this mass of peaches but we finally have it all in the jars! What was twenty pounds of peaches has now been turned into four gallons of peach jam! I am tired to say the least! And to think..we have to pick more peaches in the morning..the process will start all over again!

After spending all day inside the kitchen, I needed to escape to the garden. I slipped on my shoes and headed out the back door just in time to hear Ezzy barking at something near the marsh edge. After killing one snake at the back door yesterday, I was concerned that she might have found another. So..to the Bayou I headed. I was thoroughly armed with my camera and nothing else but I was more interested in pulling the dog back from the marsh than killing a snake that was where it should be. As I made my way through the tomato garden, I realized that Ezzy was barking up a tree and not at the ground. Now there have been instances where I have seen snakes in the trees but something just struck me as being a bit odd with this situation. Ezzy does have a habit of treeing animals so I was assuming that a squirrel was sitting on a low limb just aggravating her. She was excited to see that I was investigating her dilemma. I peered into the bushes and finally located what she had treed. There about eight feet from the ground in a small bush was a raccoon. A nice, fat raccoon..she had treed what I assume was a very pregnant critter. I called her back and let the animal clamber out of the bush and hurry on its way. No use in disturbing a lady that was "in the family way". Ezzy was extremely proud of her treeing abilities and immediately raced to a nearby hickory tree as if to say.."I might have something up this one, too!" Sadly to say, there was nary a critter in that tree..but she was just as excited to sit and stare at the tree for the next hour anyway! Silly dog!

Speaking of the tomato garden, I noticed when I hurried through earlier, that the bushes are loaded with tiny fruit. I can only hope that this year, we actually get a few tomatoes that are of a larger size. Last year, every plant in the garden turned out to be of the cherry size. That made for a lot of picking. Still, I managed to put up quite a few jars of sauce, salsa and ketchup! It pleases me to know that the plants are still doing as well as they are considering the extreme drought that we are enduring here on the Bayou. I try to water the plants but sometimes I wonder if I am just prolonging the inevitable. Hopefully..the plants will hold on a bit longer and the rains will come again.