Saving Our Peach Tree, Harvesting & Freezing Time, A Short Mountain Adventure

Saving Our Peach Tree-
We planted our Peach tree about 4 years ago. It was pretty sick last year with peach tree rust, but we treated it and it did much better this spring. It really blossomed with the mild wet spring and we were very hopeful. We have lots of peaches and the tree seemed really healthy. We came home last week with a really large branch down on the ground split from another main branch. Pretty sad! Where it's split we could have cut the other part of the branch off , but we would have lost a ton of peaches and fruit. We had had our apple tree hit by a pickup truck when part of the branch was leaning over the easement a few years ago. I remembered that some people had taken washers, big screws and screwed together broken parts of branches hoping that the tree would heal itself and grow back together. I asked Dave to do that and the apple tree is still healthy-

I asked Dave to go ahead and do that for now, to try to get the fruit ripe and then if it didn't heal up we could go ahead and take that one branch down later. So, that's what he did-

We propped up the rest of the branches-

The peaches are just about ripe probably, another week or so. We had our first two that were really great. Lesson learned that in the future we need to really thin the peaches more when they are still small. It's easy to get ahead of yourself and think wow look at all that fruit, instead of what do we need to also preserve the tree. So we will be more careful next spring and we are hopeful that branch will stay together as is? At this point we'll wait and see.... if needed we'll prune it off.

Harvesting & Freezing Time-
This is a time of year when we've started harvesting- tomatoes, two kinds of cucumbers, 4 kinds of peppers, the last of the chokecherries and blackberries. Corn will be ready soon too! We have a really good harvest of our green beans on going as well. I wanted to freeze them, but I wasn't sure if I needed to blanch them. I read this article so I'm going to try this recipe AnOregonCottage.com

I'm going to be making lots of different vegetable dishes with our harvested veggies. I am going to be freezing the chokecherries as well. When the peaches get ripe here soon I'm going to be freezing and canning some. We just don't eat that much jam anymore, so I don't know if I'll bother with that, but I can always make some later from the frozen peaches. The peaches freeze really great! I just quarter them, toss them in Fruit Fresh so they don't turn brown, put in a double Ziploc bags and suck all the air out with a straw. They keep great. I'm getting a good Basil harvest soon, time to make and freeze pesto!

A Short Mountain Adventure-
I was really restless to get up in the mountains Saturday, so I told Dave we were going somewhere but didn't tell him where. We drove up to Bogus Basin, which is a small ski area, about 40 minutes from our house. It's about 7,500 feet up. When we got to the top of the open parking I took a side road hoping to find a nice fairly level hiking trail. Most of them turned out to be really steep so I decided to turn around and go back. We decided to take the chairlift at the top and that was where the real adventure started! You could see the start of fire season here with some of the forest fires.

I thought the cell phone towers pretty well ruined the view up there, no escaping technology!

Here is what we found- lots of really beautiful flowers, Lupines, Queen Ann's lace, Junipers, grasses, sage, not sure of the rest...

The rest of it was really fun, walked down a path a ways until it was closed off to let the flowers come back. It's on National Forest land.

I took lots of photos, but to get there you had to take a chair lift, which means we needed to sign a legal disclaimer. I have never seen that anywhere, which was a red flag for me. We got on fine at the bottom of the lift. At the top staff got 2 mountain bikes off the chair lift rack, set aside on the top of the ramp, then two mountains bikers got off ahead of us. They didn't grab their bikes and move, and we had almost nowhere to go (small space)! We almost got knocked down by the lift. The bikers just stood there instead of going down the wood ramp.  Staff didn't stop the lift or yell at them to move. Going down, getting off the lift was jerky and didn't stop very slow to get off, again, had to jump out of the way. Staff needs more safety training, but maybe they don't care since you can't sue them. We're done with that, not going back. Brundage Mountain, by comparison, was safe and much better!