Wild Peaches
Wild Peaches
by Ida Livingston of Davis City, IA
Nearly every spring the trees along a lane on our place bare their bold pink blooms. They are showing that winter didn’t rob us of our peach crop.
When my husband Khoke was a kid, his mom Jenia Livingston found some wild peaches growing down by the Thompson Fork of the Grand River near the Iowa/Missouri border. She picked all the ripe ones and brought them home. Khoke’s grandfather William, who lived next door, fed some of the overripe ones to his pet ducks out by a pond. These discarded peach pits took it upon themselves to grow, and from these trees, family and friends have continued to propagate wild peaches ever since.
Wild peaches and other wild tree fruit used to be much easier to locate. They were sought out and sometimes deliberately replanted in more convenient locations. A number of factors have come together to contribute to the scarcity of some of these unique wild fruits. One factor is that most people are out of touch with the seasonal availability of foragable food. Another factor is the aggressive mowing and spraying of the roadsides. Fruit that once advertised itself on the roadsides, and invited foragers to find them, are now oft mowed or sprayed away and one must seek them out without the cheerful roadside reminder.
When I lived in Tennessee, I knew a couple people who had a wild peach in their yard that they called Indian peaches. These were small white clingstone peaches that the locals liked to pickle.
The wild peaches we have here in Southern Iowa have a surprising variance but they are all freestone. Most are a small peach ranging from walnut sized to just larger than a large egg. Some trees have fruit that is very white, some are pink all the way through, some are somewhere in between. The darkest ones are a deep maroon all the way through. These ripen around the first week or two of September here. There are just a few trees that have medium sized yellow peaches that are very sweet and ripen in mid to late September.
Propagation and Growth Characteristics
We have little peach trees that pop up from discarded pits every year and they grow easily. They grow best when they can stratify, meaning chill them in moisture. Picture a pit tossed on the ground in late summer, autumn covers it with fallen leaves that matte over it and then hold moisture. This moisture then freezes thoroughly in the winter and may pop the pit shell enabling the seed to sprout and grow when the warm spring sun wakes it up. This is how it is designed to perpetuate itself so when planting the pits it helps to recreate these conditions. I try to make sure I plant mine in the fall. Khoke’s cousin Zach Miller will up their odds by removing their outer shell before planting. Don’t hammer the shell open. The energy transfer will usually not only break the shell but shatter the nutmeat. Zach pops the pit shell by clamping the pit in a vise.
We have relatively consistent crops of these little wild peaches. They are not as cold sensitive as most of our tame ones and bear up much more consistently. When we have a particularly hard winter it will freeze their bloom buds and they won’t bloom. It takes an extended amount of -20ºF nights to nip their fruit. We haven’t lost them to late frosts either but that may be different in other zones.
We like their disease and insect resistance. We have found that we never have to spray the wild peaches for anything, neither disease nor insects. They bear up well. You can tell at a glance which peaches are tame versus the wild ones. The tame trees in our area struggle with leaf curl and the wild ones are free of it.
Keep in mind these are still peaches and they are on the short lived side of fruit tree longevity. There are apple trees that have been documented to live 200 years. But a 20 year old peach tree is an old peach tree. A 12-15 year production span is a reasonable expectation. One needs to remember to start some new peach tree seed every 10 years or so to maintain optimal production.
Preservation
These peaches make a great jam. They would be too small and tedious for standard peeling. I can many many jars of these every year and do prefer them without the peel. I find that blanching them and slipping the skins off is much faster when processing these little late summer delicacies.
Blanching Peaches
I use a large pot that fits a colander, handles and all fully into it. I fill the pot to just over half with water and then bring it to a boil. I fill the colander with peaches and lower them into the boiling water leaving them fully submerged for about 30 seconds. To lift the colander I have ladles with hooked handles and I use the hooks to catch the handles and pull out the colander. The peaches are then dumped into a tub of cool/cold water to stop the cooking process. The skins slip off readily, then I open the fruit, pop out the seed and move on to the next.
These peaches are then either canned in a light syrup, or sometimes I can them plain as a chunky sauce so I can make them into jam when I have more time in the winter. Khoke also likes them baked into fruit cookie bars. I have found that canning a peach pit (only one is necessary) helps give canned peaches, whether tame or wild, a fuller flavor.
Zach’s wife Hannah halved some of her wild peaches this year, spread them on a piece of tin to sun dry them and it worked great. She said they tasted a lot like dehydrated apricots. She left the skin on them for this.
Replant A Little of the Lost Wild
I have an appreciation for some of the principles upon which guerrilla gardening is founded on. I first heard of this from something Carla Emery once wrote. This is planting on open, desolate or waste spaces or places not necessarily owned by the planter.
When I lived in Tennessee I used to drive to the ridgetop of clearcut land and scatter walnuts. Walnuts don’t roll uphill and squirrels don’t take them far into the open. A few minutes of my time launching walnuts all over a devastated clear cut ridge would change the course of the forest regrowth there far into the future. Likewise, I spread around these wild peach pits that readily naturalize themselves so that these predecessors of some of our fragile modern fruit can continue to live and be loved by its two and four legged friends.