Urban Self Sufficiency NZ

When we bought our house, it came with a huge old Purple Peach (aka Sanguine/ Black Boy Peach) tree.

I don’t know what went wrong the first year, as when we moved in in January, (the fruit is ready in March) there was not a single fruit on the tree! We actually didn’t think it was a fruit tree!

But every year since, the tree has been absolutely laden. And in 2023 we got a whopping 250kg of fruit from the tree! This doesn’t include all the peaches that rotted before we had the chance to use them and we just threw to the chickens.

The difficulty in preserving these peaches is they rot very quickly once off the tree. So I find you have normally around 48hrs from when the fruit is picked to when it needs to be eaten or preserved.

What did we turn it into?

1. Pressure Canned Peaches

This is the quickest way to preserve a large amount of peaches.

Because peaches are a high acid food, you can actually get away with just waterbath canning these, however I do prefer to pressure can as I find I get much better seal rates with the pressure canner. (Around 60-80% seal rate with waterbath vs 99.999% seal rate when pressure canning)

I simply fill jars up with sliced peaches, push them down to get rid of any air bubbles, and pressure can like this, no added syrup or water.

2. Peach Chutney

I am 100% not a chutney fan. I believe sweet and savoury foods shouldn’t really mix! But hubby LOVES the stuff. I used to buy boxes of apricots and make him apricot chutney, but given we have so many peaches every year, I adapted the recipe to use peaches instead of buying apricots.

3. Peach Wine

Peach wine is another great way to use a large amount of peaches up in one go, and it’s super easy! Check out this blog post for my stone fruit wine recipe.

4. Dehydrated Peaches

Dehydrators are relatively inexpensive, so are another great way of preserving food. You can also dehydrate in the sun, or in the oven. Running the oven is however significantly more expensive than running an air dehydrator, and dehydrating in the sun takes a long time, plus is hard to get dry enough for long term storage.

The main thing to be aware of when storing dehydrated fruit is that it either needs to be absolutely bone dry before storing, or you need to use a preservative. I prefer to make sure the food is absolutely bone dry, and then we store the dehydrated fruit in 20L buckets with silica gel sachets.

I find one load in our small dehydrator is around 2kg of fresh peaches. It costs from $2-5 per load in 2024, depending how thickly sliced the pieces are, and whether it’s run on overnight power costs, or daytime power costs.

Store bought fruit uses a preservative so isn’t as dry as homemade. If you’re not a fan of how hard and sometimes crunchy home dehydrated fruit can be, you can either leave it longer (it softens over time) or you can steam them before eating for 2-3 minutes. Once steamed they’ll last in the fridge for around 3-4 days.

5. Fruit Leather

Fruit leather is also done in the dehydrator.

In my early fruit leather days, I found I would often end up with solid almost burnt fruit leather. Till I learnt the trick to perfect fruit leather, which I share in a blog post here.

6. Roasted Peaches

Roasted Peaches have quickly become a family favourite! We sprinkle them with brown sugar and cinnamon, and then eat as-is straight out of the oven. I even pressure canned some roasted to use on top of porridges because they are SO good!

7. Peach Jam

I’m not a big jam eater, but the kids are, so you can’t go wrong with a few jars of peach jam! The easiest way to make jam is to use the jam setting sugar as this has the pectin added already. It even comes with a jam recipe on the side of the jar too 👌

8. Gave them away

We have so many we have bags and bags full away to others to preserve themselves! There’s only so many peaches one can eat in a year 😅

You can also barter them. Depending on the variety, it can be hard to barter peaches (the purple peaches are SO readily available) but if you have enough preserved, bartering your preserves in winter is a great idea too 🙌

Other options with the peaches include free flow freezing, or freezing as a pulp for smoothies to take up less space. We just never have enough freezer space to freeze any!

The easiest way to freeze is to halve them, remove pips, and fill up containers. While this isn’t as user friendly as free flow freezing, it is fast if you’re time-poor for making jam later.

What’s your favourite way to preserve peaches? Any methods I missed?