Picking Peaches

Remember my post on apple-picking?  Well, about a month ago, on the coolest day we could find, my family and I drove down long country roads and through lookalikes of the Great Dismal Swamp to a lovely farm which had pick-your-own peaches.  We picked forty-three pounds of the the things, but even so I managed to take lots of pictures.  They came out rather well, too.  (This post is getting up so late because it took me until now to edit everything.)

From the parking lot, we had to walk about half a mile down to the orchard.  Some intelligent people drove down, but we walked.  It was just as well, because I wouldn't have been able to take photos from the car, and I'm not sure our giant of a fifteen-passenger van would have made it down there anyway. 

There was a lovely little pond with a bridge across it, so I got to practice landscape photography.

There was a lot of Queen Anne's Lace growing by that pond.  I love Queen Anne's Lace (or yarrow, as some call it), so I couldn't resist taking pictures of it. 

Now you know what it looks like. Yarrow has medicinal properties, but I can't remember what they are anymore.

 

 

 

This is the super-edited version of the first photo.  I would love fabric with this print...

I kinda sorta really like this one, even though it's a bit blurry.  It looks so fairy-ish.

Then we reached the actual orchard:

These are nectarines.  Just thought you might be wondering why they're red...

Despite asking me and my mom if every peach they picked was "good," my siblings did pretty well.  All the buckets were at least halfway filled.  (Hence the forty-three pounds.) 

 

 

Some of them had to be lifted.

I really like this sepia-toned photo.  Sepia makes everything better, doesn't it? :)

 I thought it was fun.  Orchard peaches and nectarines taste so much better than the grocery-store variety, I promise you.  Really, everything tastes better when it's not from a grocery store.

 

And yes, I am left-handed.

After we paid, we all sat out on the picnic benches and tried our lovely (and hard-earned) fruit.  I think it was worth carrying an over-ten-pound bucket (plus a sibling's smaller one) half a mile in the noon heat.  I do have a picture of us all sitting around stuffing our faces with peaches, but I'm thinking my mom would kill me if her picture was up here.  She'd say she looked fat, which is, by the way, nonsense.  My mom weighs ten pounds more than I do, and I am not fat.  Anyway, one of my brothers looks like a creep in that picture, and I wouldn't want you get nightmares.  Seriously.  He looks like the Grim Reaper or something. 

When we got home, we cut up and froze about two-thirds of the peaches.  Now my mom won't let us eat any until winter, which I protest is not fair, but she doesn't seem to care.  (I hate it when my sentences unintentionally rhyme...the rhymes are always so dumb. Ergh.)

Speaking of my mom, she did a peach-picking post (ha! Alliteration! Oh my gosh, I am such a poetry geek...) as well.  Voila: http://mrsrabbitsmusings.blogspot.com/2012/07/picking-peaches.html