Apricot Harvest and the Jam

We were invited by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints to pick apricots in the Santa Clara orchard. What an invitation!! I had just looked at purchasing apricots at the store and they were over $3 a pound. We jumped at the chance to go pick our own...for FREE.

 We arrived at 6:30 am and were greeted by friendly helpful folks who loaded us up with ladders and pails. After a word of prayer we were on our way. I waited until later to take a picture of the sign because it was still dark when we arrived.

 This was our first family adventure with CT picking anything. She loved it.

 ST loved finding the perfect apricots.

 Every time I turned around more apricots!!

 MT was amazing at harvesting hard to get to fruit. It was a thing of beauty to watch the girls work together as the sun rose.

 And the apricots began to fill our buckets. Then we transferred them to a big plastic bin we brought.

 I hope it wasn't greedy but we picked 19 lbs of apricots!! And did we make use of them: Jam, scones, muffins, and just plain fresh.

 We started by measuring out our apricots in 2 lb, pit free piles. MT and ST did all the pitting. The hardest part was waiting for the green ones to get ripe..but we didn't have to wait long. 2 days later they were ready for canning.

 I found a recipe online for jam but we changed things up a bit. Our recipe is below:

Apricot Jam

• 6 lbs pitted very ripe apricots
• 5 scant cups sugar
• 3 tea cinnamon
• 3 tea vanilla

Place everything in the crockpot and cook on high for 4-5 hours. When soft use an immersion blender and smooth the jam out. Leaving as many lumps as you like. I don't like lumps.

Or we put everything in a pot on the stove and cook for an hour. Blenderize.

Put into prepared jars. We made about 10 quarts of jam. Which is really a life saver because we are toast people and I still have not found a job.

Thank you Santa Clara Orchard!