Peach Glop

I’m feeling a little smug just now, having taught myself how to create a couple of partitions on an external hard drive* and format them, so to bring myself back down to earth I’ll ‘fess up to the fate of the much-celebrated peach mini-glut.

Lesson one when bottling peaches: take them slightly under-ripe. On no account wait until harvesting them involves flailing through a swarm of nectar-drunk wasps, waving your arms like a semaphore signalman.**

Semaphore for ‘fuck off, you vicious stripy bastards’

Lesson two when bottling peaches: you only need to dunk them in boiling water for 20 seconds to loosen the skins – not two minutes, which causes them to collapse into a pulpy mess.

Lesson three when bottling peaches: you need very little liquid for the bottling process, so there’s no need to boil up a huge saucepan full of apple juice, lemon juice and water. What was I thinking?

Lesson four when bottling peaches: take a long, sad look at the large jar of strange, pulpy mess you have created from these perfect fruits and sigh, sigh, sigh.

Next year.

 

*Paranoia about backups of a novel having proven to be somewhat more serious than paranoia about backups of a gardening book. Who’d have thought it?

**This from the wikipedia entry on flag semaphore: ‘It was used in US Civil War times. A signal corpsman commonly stood on a platform about 6–10 feet off the ground, signaling to other units. The bright orange red and white flag made a primary target for the enemy.’

Officer (from off-camera): “Get up on that box and let me see you wave them goddamn flags like you mean it, soldier! And change your goddamned undershorts!”