Peaches

A few years ago when I first started getting really interested in cooking, I wanted to learn how to grow a container garden on my balcony.  I did what I always do when I'm learning how to do something new, I called my mom for advice and then visited the library to check out every book I could on the topic.  It was spring which meant that I was trying to wrap up my school year and for that reason I was having a really hard time getting to the stack of gardening books sitting on my coffee table.  Eventually my enthusiasm overruled my level of preparedness and I went shopping for plants.  I decided to try my hand at lettuce and herbs and save the harder vegetables like carrots, bell peppers and tomatoes until after I had learned a thing or two about gardening.  I spent a lot of time visiting my parents in Wisconsin that summer and ended up under-watering each precious plant that I thought would thrive in my care.  I have tried to garden herbs multiple times since then, only to run into problems like not knowing the correct way to harvest my basil or not giving my plants enough access to sun.

I was about to give up the idea of gardening all together when we moved to Texas and discovered that the previous home owners had planted a small raised garden and a peach tree.  My parents visited back in November for Nicole's 1st birthday and my mom was the first to notice that our raised garden showed signs of growing parsley and asparagus.   When spring rolled around here in the middle of February, my moms suspicions were confirmed, we had numerous parsley plants and a couple of stalks of asparagus.  I have happily harvested the parsley for numerous recipes and I love having Nicole help me water the plants and eagerly pick her fair share of parsley to taste and then inevitably discard.

The peach tree was a separate learning curve.  We started reading about how to take care of it about the time that it was flowering.  We were a little late to the game so we weren't sure how everything was going to turn out.   Even though we made numerous mis-steps along the way, our tree did exactly what it was designed to do!

The branches that had the fewest buds on them ended up being the sweetest.  I felt like I was living in a scene right out of Little House and the Prairie while I watched Nicole and her friend happily eat peaches right off the tree while playing in the backyard.  The peaches that were clustered together weren't quite sweet enough to eat out of hand so I baked with them instead.  I had a lot of fun whipping up a batch of these peach cobbler bars with the peaches from our very own peach tree.  

We are already looking forward to next years peach season and hope that the lessons we've learned this time around will yield a better crop going forward.  We've decided that even if we don't ever master the art of growing the perfect peach, we are pretty content making an annual thing out of those peach cobbler bars.  It's a win either way! What do you like to grow? 

Love, 

Erica