I had a a brigade of squirrels running wild in my backyard this year. My peach trees were getting raided hard core. I removed a bunch of squirrels this spring and out of the clear blue as soon as my peaches smelled sweet and ripe I had a half a dozen squirrels in my yard the morning I picked all my peaches fighting me for them. They literally broke down a third of my tree a few years back busting branches to get peaches and I wasn’t going through that again. Had a few broken branches again so I knew it was time. I even put chicken wire around the tree trunk bases and made it look like an umbrella shape so they couldn’t climb up the trees. They ran up the telephone pole and the tree on the boulevard by my garage and leaped back and forth on to the garage roof to raid my peaches. Anyways, I picked 98% of them. The peaches on one of my trees I never thinned out so they are pretty small. I don’t know If they will ever ripen. They looked ripe and smelled sweet when I picked them. I have had them wrapped up in brown paper garbage bags with zero luck. I have tossed some out that turned black and some that wrinkled. Still none soft and ripe. I did take a couple of them to try and blanch today to see if could remove the skins. Only two of about 30 of the skins removed. I figured I’d give them a try anyways since they split right apart easily. I canned two jars to test with the skins on. I boiled for a half hour with about a 1/3 cup of sugar and water mix in canning jars. Hoping they will soften and sweeten a little? Any suggestions? The other two buckets with the larger peaches all ripened and are canned up. I did loose quite a few while trying to “ brown bag” ripen them.
The blue and green buckets are the smaller ones that wont ripen. Believe it or not the buckets on the left ripened right up.
Those ones on the left were from a contender peach tree and the smaller ones are from a snow princess peach tree.