Peaches and Pies-Oh My!

Well, it was a busy start to the month of September.  It had been two years since I had canned peaches and with only a few quarts left on my shelf and an extra mouth to soon feed I knew I'd better get to restocking our pantry.  My sister-in-law Katie and I decided we would hit up an orchard that our church runs because it was 1/2 the price of the fruit stands.  The only criteria for the orchard was that you had to volunteer and pick for the orchard the same amount of hours you pick for yourself.  Seemed easy enough, so we gave it a try.  It was a little mayhem and chaotic when we first arrived, experiencing the disorganization of the church orchards for the first time, but now that we've been and know what it's like, we could do it again.  

So back home we came with peaches out of our ears.  I think their baskets of 1/2 bushel are a little skewed because we ended up with 8 1/2 bushels of peaches or 4 bushels and WOW peaches!!!!  We got 70 some quarts apiece canned away for the years to come and then got to work freezing peaches and a first for me....pie filling.  I made some pie filling and then some "pie in a jar."  It was all quite fun over the week that my kitchen got turned upside down and into a sticky mess.  Here are a few pictures of my finished products.  I am not posting any pictures of my poor peaches. Between my sister-in-law and I who both suffer from "pregnancy brain" we ended up processing our jars to long, which led to them spewing out sticky water after they were removed, which gave me ugly looking peach jars with a few inches of water missing from the tops of my jars :(

Here are the "pie in a jars."  They were fun putting them together and make great little gifts

We had to try out one of our pie fillings just to make sure it was good.  I also experimented and made my first pie crust.  It got two thumbs up for all who enjoyed my taste test.