Millions of Peaches

When I met Corinna, I was into gardening but mainly tomatoes and peppers. I guess that's still true, though I am excited about our asparagus beds, and I did plant quite a bit of fall and spring stuff last season. But Corinna, she was into growing everything.

Well, not absolutely everything. Stuff like sweet corn that can be had super cheap at City Market if you're willing to buy in bulk, corn takes up a lot of space in a garden. But we've even been pleasantly surprised at how good garden grown carrots and onions are, and those normally fall into the 'buy it at City Market' column.

But the biggest difference between us was on fruit trees. As in, she planted four of them when the ink on her home mortgage was still wet. Me, the only fruit tree I ever thought of growing was a cider apple variety such as Kingston Black (still might squeeze one of those in up front). I'm a fan of figs, too, and since I learned of hardy figs there's a good chance one of those is coming in. But Corinna, she's all about the fruit trees. Not just ours, she'll harvest anything someone else isn't utilizing, peaches, pears, apples, even crab apples (good for adding acidity and pectin to jams).

One of those fruit trees she planted out back, though, the white peach, it's just going berserk. These photos do not show the whole crop, the branches were still heavy with fruit when I took them, and Corinna had done considerable drying and canning already by this point. Cue the Presidents of the United States of America, millions of peaches, peaches for free...

Hearing Corinna talk about what all she's going to do with these peaches is kind of like hearing Bubba from Forrest Gump talk about all the shrimp recipes his family knew.