August and September at TAProots Farm features STONEFRUIT, namely peaches and nectarines, with apricot trees not yet yielding fruit. The nectarines are a pleasant surprise after years of small fruit which never seemed to ripen. This year and last provided fruit for eating and making jam and sauces. The peach crop began with an exuberant bloom and formation of too many fruit, requiring dropping 50% of the small fruit to allow the ripe peaches and nectarines to be larger. It is always a race to pick the almost ripe peaches before the birds find them, so we do the final ripening in brown paper bags. The first variety to ripen are Reliance, followed by Redhaven and Cresthaven. This year’s experiments with these stonefruit include sauces. A clear winner is a cooked peach sauce made with ripe peaches, sugar, cinnamon, brandy, and dashes of almond extract and nutmeg. Fresh peach slices can be added before use on ice cream or pancakes. Another experiment was a cooked spicy nectarine sauce with fresh nectarines, sugar, mashed ginger, and cardamon. Both cooked and freezer jams also use our bumper crop. The final peach crop are Finger Lakes Superhardy, producing fruit at the end of August into September. These will produce more jam and dried peach slices. To assure our future peach crop, several Saturn variety peaches were planted; these are “donut” fruit, shaped like a pincushion. It would not be summer without stonefruit.
TAProots
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