Sudden summer temperatures (high in the mid nineties) made the peaches I picked on Monday ripen up fast.  They turned out to be the most delectable peaches I've ever eaten, and I spent hours with sticky juices rolling down my chin.  At long last, though, I admitted that we couldn't consume every one --- time to process the bounty.

Earlier in the week, I had figured out the best thing to do with peaches that develop a rotten spot while still too hard to gnaw on.  I cut off the good flesh and cooked it up in water over gentle heat, producing the most richly-flavored peach sauce ever.  It turns out that those peaches were plenty ripe to eat without additional sweetening --- it was just the rock-hard flesh that was turning us away.

With ripe peaches, though, we prefer the flavor of uncooked fruit, so I made fruit leather.  Previously, I've skinned our peaches during the preparation stage, but that doesn't seem to be necessary, although it's (obviously) essential to hack away any rotten bits and to remove the maggots in the center of two-thirds of our peaches.  (No, chickens under the trees didn't seem to lower our Oriental fruit moth pressure this spring.  If anything, the tree our chicks spent the most time under had the most moths.)

Despite ripening our peaches inside, perhaps 10% of them still came down with brown rot before they softened, so I experimented with adding the good parts of these unripe peaches into the leather mix.  Although the result is a little chunkier than when using ripe peaches, at a ratio of about 20% unripe flesh to 80% ripe flesh, the resulting leather is even tastier than without.  (I understand this is how people make peach jam too, by including a certain percent of unripe fruit.)

All of the peaches that were ripe by Wednesday afternoon filled up the dehydrator to capacity, but more were ready to go Thursday, and yet more will ripen over the weekend.  I'm carefully managing my peach stores, segregating each day's pickings in one zone on the table so they're easy to tell apart from their cohorts, then plucking out fruits that develop the least sign of rot.  Oh, and breathing in the astonishing scent of a bushel of ripening peaches.  Delectable!

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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