Peaches, Using and Storing Garden Fruit

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Fresh peaches are only available a few months a year. Stretch out that yummy season by using and preserving fresh peaches for later and avoiding waste. Using garden produce before it’s wasted is important for the budget and the tummy.

How to store fresh peaches

We use them to make a scrumptious peach crumble. We use them to make peach syrup for pancakes. We bake peach muffins, peach pancakes, and peach cobbler bread to name a few things. Storing garden fruit helps you enjoy the flavors year round. 

You can substitute fresh peaches for any other fruit in any of your favorite recipes. They make great bread, smoothies, pies, ice creams, whatever you love to eat.

You can save a ton of money by buying things in season and they taste better because they are fresher. If you buy peaches out of season, they have to come from further away.

Also remember places outside of the US have different food growing laws and there are many things they can use on their food such as humanure, that are illegal in the US for safety reasons. Another great reason to buy local.

We are working hard to grow our own peaches at Little Sprouts. Our two little trees that produce some fruit for us, but we are working on growing more. We love to buy bushels of fresh peaches from our local porter peach barn and save a bunch of them for winter.

Daycares are not allowed by USDA or DHS to serve home canned foods in daycare, so I freeze them for future use. You can also dehydrate them and they are delicious like candy.

Porter Peach Barn

Any way you preserve them, they will not taste better than when you started. Make sure you get delicious fruit to begin with. Our favorite is Red Haven. At our peach barn, Livesay’s Peach Barn in Porter, Oklahoma, they sell the most delicious Red Havens you can imagine.

Don’t use those yucky Styrofoam tasting grocery store peaches. Make sure you get a quality peach to begin with. If you are within 500 miles of Porter, it’s worth the drive to get them from Livesay’s.

Livesay’s also has their own cookbook with a ton of ways to use peaches. Check it out if you go to the barn to get your peaches. 

How to store peaches

When fresh peaches come straight from the tree or fruit stand, they are usually not soft yet. They will smell great, be a beautiful color, but not yet be perfect for eating. The best way to store a fresh peach is to leave it on the counter for a few days until it has a slight give when pressed. 

Don’t squeeze it too hard or you’ll bruise it. Once they have that give, they are ready to start eating. Gobble up as many of those delicious globes of goodness as you can! Leave them on the counter for a few days more and then once the fresh peaches have been soft for a few days, go ahead and put them in the crisper drawer of your refrigerator. If you want to store a peach longer, freeze them. 

To freeze peaches, first, you need to get a big stock pot full of water up to a boil. Add a pinch of salt to the water. Wash your fruit well. Drop them into the boiling water a few at a time. Let the peaches boil in the salted water for 3 minutes. Remove them. Plunge them into a bowl of ice water. Leave them in the ice water until your next batch of peaches are done blanching. Then drain them.

Slice your peaches, or half them and remove the pits. Be careful because sometimes a little bit of the pit can be left behind inside. Run your finger inside the hole the pit left to make sure it’s all soft. Biting into a pit is not fun.

Once all your peaches are sliced in sizes you like, you can freeze them in quart size freezer bags. I do not peel my peaches. I feel the skins are nutritious and I don’t want to waste them. If you wanted to peel yours, you can slide the skins off easily after they are blanched.

How do you preserve fresh peaches

Make sure to remove as much air as possible from the bag. Peaches will save for months in the freezer. I thaw them in a bowl and serve them partially slushy. We call them slushy peaches. They taste similar to eating a canned peach, but the flavor is amazing. Canned peaches from the store having nothing on these babies.

In the winter, when there is no tasty produce around, we open a bag of our peaches and thaw them and say, “TASTES LIKE SUMMER TIME”. It’s a tradition.

Check out these other food preservation articles for your garden produce.

Preserving Hot Peppers from the garden, preserving Green Beans from the garden, preserving Cucumbers from the garden, preserving Tomatoes from the garden.

Storing garden produce to make it last as long as possible