Red Haven peaches at harvest.

A great day here at the farm. We managed to fight off some very determined squirrels, rats, birds and raccoons (and maybe coyotes) and get a real peach harvest. Our first tree to ripen gave us a few large, tasty peaches, but the animals dug under the nets and took the rest. Frustrating, but a good lesson. The tree we harvested today had most of the peaches, so we were able to augment the nets with wood and rocks until the peaches ripened. And we got a great haul of Red Haven Peaches! It’s been a few years coming and it was great fun to pick the peaches with the kids (although they found out picking fruit in the sun is real work).

Red Haven trees are big producers.

Weighting the nets kept the varmints from digging underneath.

The haul from one small tree- a few hundred peaches about 1/2 the size of a baseball.

As for the Red Haven peaches, they are one of the most common “eating” peaches. They are freestone peaches with a bright, sweet flavor and a decent amount of acidity. They are popular with farmers and home gardeners, as the trees are heavy producers and the peaches have a long “shelf life”. Red Havens are in season usually from mid-July until the end of August. We like these peaches a lot, but the Suncrests are still our favorites. But as we have a harvest of just one Suncrest peach, the Red Havens will be our focus this summer- at least until the nectarines ripen a few weeks from now.

Our “lonely” Suncrest peach. Hopefully more next year.

Nectarines are at least a week or two out. Hopefully our augmented nets hold up.

So what we will do with all of these peaches? We are making peach-lavender jam, peach-vanilla ice cream, maybe peach butter and certainly a batch of Bellinis and other peach-driven cocktails. And we are already eating the peaches out of hand. But as much of the Putney Farm crew will be on the road for the next few weeks, we will give many of these away. Few things make us happier as gardeners than to have enough to share freely with friends.

Time to get to work….

Related articles

• Heavy Branches and the Lonely Peach (putneyfarm.com)
• Peaches! And Updates From The Orchard and Garden (putneyfarm.com)
• Bonus Cocktail: The Orchard Moonraker (putneyfarm.com)
• Peach Bellinis to Crumble Bars: 15 Reasons to Buy a Pound of Peaches – Recipe Roundup (thekitchn.com)
• National peach ice cream day (eatocracy.cnn.com)