Britton was sitting out on the front porch this evening when he heard…”cccrreeaak” and then he saw a huge branch of the peach tree split from the tree. It was so heavy with peaches that it just fell down! We harvested all the hard peaches and we’ll see if they will ripen up, but the tree looks super weird and bare now. Hopefully it will live through the damage! We love peaches and were looking forward to the bumper crop. There are still quite a lot on the tree, but Britton pulled a few off the other branches that looked to be drooping too much.
The tree with the fallen branch
The crack in the branch up close
Britton with the fallen branch– it’s pretty good sized!
Peaches that we had to remove just from that one branch! Bummer! But they may be saveable/edible
How do you keep the birds from eating all of your fruit?
The birds haven’t even tried yet, so we haven’t had to do anything with that.
Gotta cut off that branch below the tear so you don’t invite rot in. You can prop up the heavy branches with boards or upside down rakes somehow. Looks like you need to cut the central leader after the harvest to encourage low growing, sturdy side branches. I got some unripe peaches from SAMS and was sooo looking forward to them. They ended up not ripening (despite being in with an apple (ethanol gas) and were kind of grainy but dehydrated well. You could always do that or make a cold peach soup (flavor should still be there)!
They had some tips on how to rippen peaches. I just never buy them until the big juicy Colorado ones are ready to be eaten because the ones at the stores are usually hard as rocks. Give their suggestions a try.
http://www.tallcloverfarm.com/74/the-best-way-to-ripen-peaches