Peach Preserves

I've written about dehydrating peaches and making peach butter, but there are a few other things I do with peaches:  can them (as-is, with syrup), pickle them, and make peach preserves.  The latter is actually one of the most common.  As I have noted before, I do make things other than sugar-laden treats with fruit, but peach preserves are easy, and a little bit of peaches go a long way.  I get twice as much preserves as butter for the same amount of peaches, at least partly because the extra sugar in preserves (twice as much) increases the bulk.

Making peach preserves is pretty easy and I have (so far) not screwed it up so it must also be nearly fool-proof.  I start off doing something that is recommended against:  I double the recipe in the Ball Blue Book (BBB).  Pickyourown.org has a recipe, too, that is heavier on the fruit, lighter on the sugar--but I still use more peaches than they recommend.

I use eight cups (actually more like nine) of chopped, peeled peaches.   To peel, float them in simmering (not boiling) water for a few minutes; then the skins come off pretty easily.  You can just pull them off and don't need to cut, except in a few places.  Then I quarter them and chop them into relatively small pieces.  I probably divide each peach into 160 small chunks, which is not as slow as it sounds.  I can peel and chop a peach in about two minutes (or less).  According to the weight/volume on pickyourown.org, nine cups should come to a little more than five pounds fresh (you may need more if you need to cut around plum curculio larvae or other things).  The full recipe is:

8-9 cups chopped peaches
4 tablespoons lemon juice
14 cups sugar
2 packages of pectin.

I add the peaches to the pot and dump a proportionate amount of lemon juice in as I'm filling it; I don't treat separately to prevent browning.  Once the peaches are in the pot, I mash them up with the potato masher, much as I noted with the blueberry preserves.

 I then add the pectin--so everything is in the pot except for the sugar--and start heating it on low/medium heat.  When it boils, I dump in the sugar, mix it up, and turn the heat up a bit to boil it again.  Once it boils for the second time (which can take 15 minutes or so), I let it go for about a minute--during which it will be starting to foam a lot--then turn the heat off.  After that, it's just a matter of filling the jars and canning them.  I use pint jars and get about eight pints from the nine cups of peaches (I usually have a little left over that I just refrigerate).  These steps are straight from the BBB.

The jars seal quickly and I have never had any trouble with them setting up, but once I think it was somewhat thin; tilting a jar would make the contents shift a bit, albeit stiffly.

As you can see in the picture below, the jam is brightly colored and doesn't have any issues with turning brown.  After a couple of years the jam will be darker in color, but still is good.  I've used preserves up to about four years old and they are still fine.

This is an easy and very tasty way to preserve fruit. It probably shouldn't be a mainstay for obvious reasons; each jar has about one cup of fruit and almost two cups of sugar in it.  However, in small increments it's fine.  I go through maybe five or six jars per year.

Although Whey Low says that its product can be used 1:1 in place of sugar for preserves, I haven't tried it.  That'd be very expensive (although I use almost as much in my annual cranberry canner load, that yields seven or eight quarts vs. eight pints).

Although I'm somewhat less than fully objective, I like my peach preserves better than any I've ever tried--even ones made with sugar and Belle of Georgia peaches, which are what I have usually used (off my trees in the back yard, which now have expired).  I don't know what it is about them that makes them better, but they really do have a good flavor.  Making them is well worth the time.

Dehydrating peaches

As I mentioned last year, I lost my crop in 2015 due to a late frost.  In late March that year, my temp dropped to a horrifying 23 degrees at ground level one night, wiping out both the blueberries and peaches, which were in full bloom.  I tried spraying water on everything but the hose froze, so I gave up.  I later found out that a few Belle of Georgia peaches survived at the top of the tree.  The killing cold was only at ground level.  However, by the time I noticed them, they were long-neglected in terms of spraying (for disease and insects) and did not mature well.  A few blueberries made it, too, probably due to buds not being open at the time of the freeze.  But I got just a handful (literally) off of five bushes.

This year was back to normal, at least for one of the trees.  As I indicated last year, my peaches were on dwarf rootstock, which various sources have indicated don't have long lifespans.  This was the trees' 16th year in the ground, and the yellow cling continued a steep decline that began a couple of years ago.  It only yielded five pounds--which were good and eaten fresh (bug free)--and the tree will be turned into firewood this winter. It is pretty much dead at this point.  Alas.  The Belle of Georgia produced about 55 pounds, which is somewhat less than the record year.  BG had some issues with the harvest, too, which I'll detail another time.  But I'll take the 55 pounds and be happy.

I turned the peaches into pie filling mix (at the time of processing, that just means putting five pounds of sliced treated peaches into a bag and freezing), peach preserves (made in a fashion similar to the pear preserves  described recently), peach butter, and I also dehydrated some.

It's the same process I follow with apples.  Slice, treat to prevent darkening, and put on the racks in the dehydrator.  I leave the skins on.  I don't peel unless forced.  The result is a very high-quality product that keeps for a long time.  I still have some dehydrated peaches from my bumper crop a few years ago.

I have also canned peaches--as in sliced and put into syrup--but that is probably my least favorite way of preserving them.  They are okay that way, but it is much less work to dehydrate.

Peach Butter

One of the ways to deal with a rush of peaches is to make peach butter.  I have only done this a couple of summers, when I had a gross surplus.  Peach butter yields about half as much finished product (in terms of volume) as making peach preserves.  According to my records, I got about 4.5 pints out of 10 lb. of unprocessed peaches (the half pints I just put in the refrigerator and used right away).  I did several batches the one summer I got over 100 lb. off my trees (as well as dried some, made preservers with some, canned some sliced, froze some for pies, pickled some... it was a good problem to have).

With canning I'm not innovative--I just follow recipes out there from trusted sources, such as the Ball Blue Book (BBB), the National Center for Home Food Preservation (NCHFP):

National Center for Home Food Preservation

Or PickYourOwn.org,

Pickyourown.org

The latter mostly replicates the NCHFP, but has a few additional recipes.  The BBB does not list cinnamon, while PickYourOwn does.  I've made it both ways (though I haven't used the other spices mentioned); each recipe has strengths. One friend specifically requested no cinnamon because that's the way her mother made it.  I use less than amount of sugar indicated in the BBB, which calls for 1 cup per pound of peaches (vs. almost 2 cups per pound with peach preserves, so peach butter has about half as much sugar). I only use about 4 cups of sugar for the 10 lb. load.  Note, however, that my yield of finished product is much lower.  According to the BBB, my 10 lb. of peaches should have yielded about 9-10 pints.  That just hasn't happened for me any of the times I have made it.  Maybe I cook it down too much.  I like my finished product nonetheless. When I add cinnamon, I add up to 1/2 tablespoon per cup of sugar--in other words, maybe 4 tablespoons for a full batch.  This is the ratio in the PickYourOwn recipe.  One more thing about the sugar:  I have usually used mostly Belle of Georgia peaches for the butter, and it's a very sweet peach.  That might matter.

The first step in the BBB is to wash, blanch, peel, and pit the peaches.  I detest peeling peaches, so avoid that step.  I simply cut them into pieces, pit them, and toss them straight into the food mill (as it turns out, the one picture I have of this process was mostly the yellow cling peaches, not Belle of Georgia).






If the peaches are fully ripe and soft, you can mill them raw...it takes a little bit of work, but is not bad. Then again, in my laziness maybe I'm creating extra work for myself.  Also, maybe a lot of fruit sticks to the skins (which don't mill) and that's part of why I get a lower yield.  At any rate, it works for me.  The stuff that drains out of the food mill will be peach slurry with a thin consistency.  I fill the crock pot (10 lb. comes close to doing that) and heat it on medium initially, then drop it to low for a while--overnight. I add the sugar and cinnamon (if used) once it's in the pot.

I cook it down until I like the consistency.  Generally it takes about 18 hours.  As you can see, I've adopted the butter knife trick mentioned on the PickYourOwn page to hold the lid off the rim of the pot so the water can evaporate.

Eventually, the flavor seems to deteriorate a little and it heads towards having a scorched taste.  So one can only push it so far.  My peach butter is fairly thin as a finished product, but refrigerating it makes it thick enough (comparable to apple butter you might buy in the store).

Once it cooks down to the right consistency, simply ladle it into the jars and process in a boiling water bath canner for about 10 minutes (15 min where I live, over 1000' elevation in the Piedmont).

Note that the BBB does not call for added lemon juice to boost the acidity, as is indicated for the more-heavily sugared preserves (I assume the lemon juice is needed for the latter because all of the sugar raises the pH of the peaches to the point that they can't be canned in boiling water).

Last year my peach harvest was down so I just did preserves.  Since I will be buying any peaches I do anything with this year--due to the late freeze--I might make more peach butter.

I've given jars of this to a number of people and all have complimented it--meaning they are either very polite or it's reasonably good. 

Growing Peaches in the Peach State

I might as well start off first with one of the hardest things I've dealt with.  Getting a successful crop of peaches in the Southeast is tough.  Georgia is called the Peach State (many in South Carolina sneer at that; they produce more peaches there).  However, peaches are not a plant-and-harvest crop here, or at least, I have not found them to be.  I've had to deal with two things that work against getting a successful harvest: brown rot and plum curculio.

Brown rot is a plant disease that can infect peaches at or immediately after bloom, or later in the growing season.  As peaches ripen toward the end--when they become somewhat soft and smell peachy--they are particularly susceptible to brown rot infestation.

These are peaches I pulled off in a prior year because of brown rot.  Most years I lose about half my crop to it.  To mitigate brown rot damage, I have implemented several steps:

I mulch under my trees with cypress chips, and rake them up each winter in the dormant season and replace them.  This also rakes up fallen peaches from the prior season.  Brown rot can overwinter in twig and branch cankers, mummified peaches, and fallen peaches.

I spray fungicides.  I use a lot of products.  Daconil can be sprayed in the dormant season and up through full bloom--it's not considered organic.  Lime sulfur and copper sprays can be used, as well, as can captan (these latter ones are considered to be organic).  It's important to engage in dormant season spraying, at bud swell, first pink, full bloom, and post-bloom--until harvest.  Commercial orchards in this part of the country do 40 sprayings a year for plant diseases and insect pests.  After petal fall, I usually use captan exclusively.  It's a wettable powder.  It's not a panacea--the sad spectacle above happened when I was spraying captan frequently--but it does produce some control of the disease pressure.

I also harvest my peaches when not quite fully ripe and let them ripen indoors.  That seems to reduce the losses to brown rot dramatically.

This was my dining room table a couple of years ago with picked peaches finishing up.  Once brought indoors, I do occasionally lose peaches to brown rot, but it's much less of a problem.

As the peaches are starting to ripen, it's very important to scan the trees daily and pull off peaches starting to get brown rot.  A peach can be completely consumed in just a couple of days and while the brown rot is destroying that one peach, it will be throwing off thousands of spores that can infect adjacent peaches.  Twigs can also become infected and die; it took me a couple of years to figure this out, but I noticed that the leaves next to brown-rotted peaches would turn yellow.  These doomed twigs need to be pruned out or they'll serve as reservoirs for future infection.

Controlling insect damage is something that I have belatedly realized is important in controlling brown rot, too.  An insect bite on a peach that breaks the skin seems to open it up to injury.  I don't have a picture of this for you, but I frequently find that if brown rot is just starting on a peach, at the center of the lesion will be a hole bitten in the peach by some insect--it's not just plum curculios that victimize peaches.

Elberta is a variety that is somewhat brown rot resistant (table of varieties and their resistance can be found here: Varieties List-University of West Virginia ).  Another thing that I think would help is planting early varieties (this would be good for both insect damage and brown rot).  My two varieties at the house here are Belle of Georgia and some unknown early cling peach (it was supposed to be Elberta, but it ripens in mid-June and almost every time the pit has to be cut out; freestone it most definitely is not).  I love Belle of Georgia, but it's highly susceptible to brown rot--maybe that's not so bad for California, but it's not good here.  I get a crop out of my BG tree almost every year, but I lose a lot of it to disease.  The problems with early varieties are that 1) they're clingstone in most cases and 2) they're less available.

Next up:  plum curculio.  This nasty little bug attacks stone fruits most of all (as the name suggests), but it also goes after apples and pears.  It's a small snout-nosed beetle, and the female carves c-shaped flaps in the skin of developing peaches, then lays eggs.  The larvae burrow down to the pit and feed.  Curclio can be defeated a couple of ways:  barriers and insecticides.

Commercial orchards generally spray imidan, which is a pesticide not available in the small-scale retail market.  Malathion or Sevin work, as well--they just have to be applied frequently at the right times.

Most people I talk to don't want to spray insecticides.  That leaves barriers, and the only viable one I know of is Surround--a kaolin clay powder that can be mixed with water, then sprayed on the trees.  I use 1 cup per gallon (more clogs my sprayer), and at least three coats need to be put on to have a deterrent effect.  The goal is to make it so the curculio don't recognize a host tree when they land on it.  Reapplication is necessary after a heavy rain.

This sounds like a major pain, and it is--but a couple of coats can be applied in one day, then another one the next day.  I have gotten pretty good control with Surround--I generally have attack rates of about 5-20% with Surround vs. as high as 80% without it. One problem with Surround:  I sometimes spray just the developing fruit, and other times spray the foliage, too.  Plants can allegedly photosynthesize even with the clay on their leaves.  Belle of Georgia does not like Surround.  Whenever I have sprayed the foliage, I've soon gotten a lot of leaves turning yellow and dropping off.  So with BG I target just the fruit.

When to spray:  Basically, you have to have control in place before the wretches start laying eggs.  You can use degree days:

NC State Degree Day Model

It sounds complex but is not bad.  Take the second day when the temperature is over 70 and use that as your start date, then calculate degree days (DD) using a 50-degree basis.  The curculio are on the move from 50 to 400 DD and are laying between 100 and 700 DD; a second generation goes to work after 1100 DD.  Last year in my area, my start date was 3/31 (which was somewhat late) and I hit 728 DD on 5/26, at which point I suspended further Surround spraying.  You can calculate DD manually, or use calculators available online:

Pioneer GDU Calculator

Bizee Degree Days Calculator

The Pioneer calculator doesn't have a basis temp, but 50 is usually used for corn, too, so it should work ok. The Bizee calculator can do heating or cooling with a user-set basis temp and outputs a CSV file. Many states have weather station networks that have DD calculators, also.  In Georgia:

Georgia Automated Environmental Monitoring Network

What this all shows is that you need to start spraying very soon after petal fall.  My peaches are usually in bloom anytime between the first and third weeks of March.  Soon thereafter they need a barrier to deter curculio.

Surround can be bought online--a few places sell small bags; Seven Springs Farm has a decent price for 25 lb.  I got a single bag a few years ago and still have half of it.

Seven Springs Farm-Surround

Now, you might be able to grow peaches with no spraying whatsoever.  In California or the Desert Southwest, this might even be the norm. There are no curculio out there, but they do have coddling moth to contend with in some places (which have a similar impact). The low humidity mitigates against diseases. It can work even in the Southeast--I have a friend here in the Atlanta area with a tree in her front yard who doesn't do any spraying, and she still gets peaches.  With both of these pests, however, prevention is better than treatment.  I got some peaches my first couple of years with no spraying, too, then the curculio found me and brown rot came soon after.  Once either gets established in your orchard--even if it's only two trees--you can probably forget about getting a viable harvest with no spraying in future years.  It's probably best to start a good control program that will prevent outbreaks of either problem.

Another plant disease that hits peaches is bacterial spot; My BG got that one year but the peaches were still edible.  It's mostly cosmetic, but does make the skin of the peaches somewhat tough.

University Extension pages have a wealth of information about successful peach growing.  For example:

University of West Virginia

Peaches can be grown successfully--it's just a lot of work.  My first two trees--mentioned above--are on dwarf rootstock and I have gotten as much as 130 lb. off of the two combined.  70-100 lb. has happened several times.  This year: zero... a late frost after bloom wiped out the crop :-(  That has only happened a few times in the 15 years I've been growing them.

The background photo on this blog is from my BG tree last year. It can be done and it's satisfying to bring in a successful crop.  Then you just have to figure out what to do with all the peaches.  That will be the subject of future posts.

I've  now gotten another couple of trees that are standards; they're late-ripening freestones (Bounty and Contender).  They haven't started producing yet.  I'm thinking I should hunt up some early clingstones...