Post by chrysanthemum on May 16, 2022 21:18:22 GMT -6
We had an old, overgrown peach tree in a corner of our backyard when we moved to Texas a few years ago. It put on a fairly good crop our first spring, but we only got to eat one. Just as the fruit was ripening, the squirrels stripped every fruit save one off the tree.
The tree doesn’t always set fruit because it blooms pretty early in the warm winters down here, and then cold snaps kill the blossoms. A couple years ago, though, I managed to save a bunch of peaches by wrapping some branches in bird netting. This year our tree is much, much smaller because we lost the majority of the old growth last year during the February freeze, and it actually set fruit despite a late freeze in March when it was in bloom. I had asked my husband to help me net the whole thing if possible. Before we got to it yesterday evening we both noticed peach pits on the walkway under the tree, and we knew the squirrels had decided it was time to eat. We figured that instead of netting the tree and having squirrels fighting their way in, we’d just harvest the fruit since it was well on the way to being ripe.
The peaches are really, really small because the tree is almost all new growth off an old trunk. I knew that it was setting fruit, but I didn’t really process just how heavy a load it was for those young shoots. I should have thinned and didn’t. Between too many fruits and not enough water, most of these don’t even reach golfball size. The ripe ones are still tasty, though, and I’ll be busy with them. (They’re clingstone, so that makes processing harder.)
The little basket in the front of the photo were the peaches that had been damaged in some way (mostly birds pecking, I think), so I put those out to be eaten first. Tonight I used them up making peach ice cream. That was a nice treat after another hot day (96 for a high here).
