Notes on preserving blueberries & peaches
What to do if you find yourself in possession of a whole lot of peaches ripening all at once, and putting up copious amounts of blueberries
This post is a bit of a deviation from posts in the past - as I’m going to be discussing two fruits that I no longer attempt to grow at home. I do, however, buy them from nearby farmers in quantity when in season to put up in quantity.
A note on my experience growing peaches and blueberries in the Willamette Valley
Peaches - are notoriously disease prone. But like all new fruit growers, I was unaware of this fact and still attempted to give it a shot. I have a nectarine tree that has rarely given me fruit, and is currently on its way out due to bacterial canker and peach leaf curl.
I have also grown a leaf curl resistant variety, but the flavor was pretty boring so I took it out. Another leaf curl resistant variety - the unfortunately named “Black Boy” - did not set well, and the flavor was awful when it did, so I took it out.
Though you can find peach leaf curl resistant varieties, their flavor does not come even close to varieties that aren’t resistant. And they are still incredibly prone to bacterial canker.
My understanding is that, in order to grow peaches/nectarines well on the rainy side west of the cascades, you’ll need to get very good at spraying, and peach orchards are sprayed roughly 40x/year. Much of that spray is anti-fungal, which I’m not keen on spraying here in the forest, especially since I grow my own mushrooms.
Blueberries - do not grow super well for me. I think because I didn’t pay close enough attention to their pH requirements. My soil, last time I checked, is closer to neutral than acidic (possibly due to one of the vents on the Boring Lava Field being on my property?). My understanding is that the blueberry farmers that do well routinely check and adjust the pH of their soil.
I did get some berries when I attempted to grow them, however, the other reason that I gave up on blueberries for the time being is birds. Robins in particular like to strip the berries off the plants before they have fully ripened. I live on a wetland in bird paradise, and the birds are plentiful. One set of robins hatched 3 nests out of just one nest on the side of my house so far this year. Bird netting doesn’t work well and is super annoying to work with, and scare tactics just don’t work to keep that many birds out.
There is likely to come a day when I have so much of my own various plums, pears, apples, mulberries, persimmons, etc., that I won’t need to do any supplementing from other farms. And I may try blueberries again some day if I find a good solution to the bird problem. But for now, I stock up from outside sources.
Where I source blueberries and peaches
Lucky for me, there are farms nearby that offer peaches and blueberries for a pretty decent rate.
TK Orchards, out of Aurora, offers excellent peaches at $2/pound (2024 rate), unless you meet the 100 pound mark, then they are only $1.50/pound. You will want to follow their Facebook page to find out what varieties are offered when - it is usually a window that only lasts a few days per variety. Picking goes fast, and it takes me about an hour to gather 100 pounds of peaches.
Morning Shade Farm, out of Canby, offers a decent rate on pre-picked blueberries at roughly $33/10 pound bag or $3.30/pound. I find this convenient when I am too busy to pick or the weather is too hot for my body to be out picking. The berries are packed ready to go directly into the fridge or the freezer. They have u-pick as well at a slightly less expensive rate.
Also near me is a farm that sells berries for $1.60/pound, but this is kind of a secret place that you have to get invited to. The farm is on the outskirts of Estacada, sort of near Oregon City. If you’re local and want to be put on their email list, send me your email address and I will forward to them.
Prices for u-pick berries vary dramatically - ranging from the lower end of $1.60/pound to upwards of $4/pound. If you like to squirrel away a lot of berries, this amount can add up pretty quickly, so it pays to do research. If you’re near me, you can check out the Tri-county farms website. Pickyourown.org is a good resource for folks outside the area.
20 pounds of blueberries
A few weeks ago I was feeling the need to stock up on frozen blueberries, so decided to go ahead and put in an order for 2 - 10 pound bags of blueberries from the above-mentioned farm.
The varieties they had ripe at the time were Toro and Duke. Duke usually tastes pretty bland for me (flavor varies farm-to-farm and how long the berries have been on the bush). Normally I wait until Liberties are ripe, as they taste the best out of the varieties I’ve had that they pre-pick for their customers. But I haven’t had Toro, so decided to give it a shot.
Normally I don’t like to do anything with my blueberries beside simply freezing them. Most of them get eaten plain, slightly thawed. Some get put into baked goods.
But these Toro… they just have very little flavor and are likely to just sit in the freezer taking up valuable space.
I decided to give blueberry jam a shot, thinking that if any berries needed added sugar and acids to give them flavor, these were them. The recipe that I came across came out of a book I have on the shelf by America’s Test Kitchen called Foolproof Preserving. It appears there is an online version that you’ll need to pay to access, but I think it is worth it.
The recipe ratio appealed to me as it uses about a 1 part blueberry to 1/2 part sugar. Many jam recipes are 1:1 or more. The recipe also uses a couple of tablespoons of Sure-jell low sugar pectin, lemon zest, and lemon juice.
The result: excellent flavor. The combo of acid and lemon zest and sugar pulled the flavor out of the blueberries and I am super happy with the results. I made a few batches.
Another recipe I tried is Blueberry Compote, out of the newest copy of the Joy of Cooking. It uses 1/4 cup sugar: 2 cups blueberries. It also uses lemon zest & juice and cinnamon. I find the flavor quite good on bagels and whatnot. It’s a little less sweet than jam, and it does seem to get slimy after about 3 days, so careful how much you make at one time as it is to only be used fresh and not for canning. There’s many variations to compote out there online that you could try.
The next recipe I tried for jamming blueberries turned out exceptional as well, but it combines peaches and blueberries, so I will cover that in the next section.
100 pounds of peaches
Some years ago I discovered the Dixie Gem peach at the orchard I described above. I find that it ripens at a good pace, so 100# of peaches generally get eaten and processed for the freezer over the span of 2 weeks or so. I put some of them in the refrigerator to retard their ripening, which helps even things out.
Last year I decided to shake things up and went for Suncrest. They were ok, but not as good as the Dixie Gems. They didn’t peel as easily. Also, we like to eat most of our peaches raw out of the freezer partially or all the way thawed, and these turned a bit brown and mushy so not terribly appetizing.
This year, I decided to try a new-to-me variety called Red haven. I also picked some of my stand-by, the Dixie Gems. I had read that Red Haven don’t brown like many other varieties do, which made me think they’re probably quite good for the freezer. I tasted them while at the orchard and found that they are excellent in flavor, so the majority of my picking was this variety.
But what I didn’t know about this variety is that they tend to go bad very quickly. And often it isn’t obvious. Here’s what this same peach looks like if you flip it over.
So rather than leisurely taking my time to eat and prepare for freezing, the rush was on to save these fruits before they all went bad.
I’ve never done anything with peaches besides freezing them before. What to do? Even if I were interested in the traditional canning method, I don’t think this variety would be good for canning as slices, as it is too watery and would probably turn to mush. Otherwise, I don’t have the shelf space to dedicate to canned peaches. Most of what goes into the jars is syrup - which doesn’t get used - seems like a waste of space and lids to me.
I could freeze them, but the amount of space needed for *that* many peaches is a bit more than I have at the moment.
I decided to try some different methods for putting up peaches, with mixed results.
Method one: nope.
This jam recipe is one that I would not recommend. I was a little hesitant as the recipe in this box called for 2 parts sugar to 1 part fruit. Yikes. But I have had this box of pectin on the shelf for some time, and it needed to get used. The result is weird - most of the juice on the peaches cooked out, and the fruit bits floated to the top of the jars. I will not be doing this again.
Method two: hesitantly recommend.
The next recipe I tried is Peach Fruit Topping from the National Center for Home Food Preservation. The sugar ratio is 8 cups fruit: 3 cups sugar.
The result: excellent flavor, but the texture is a bit off. The recipe says to mash the peaches, which results in lot of gloppy strings. The recipe says to not use a blender or food processor as it will incorporate too much air. Next time I try this recipe, I will try chopping the peaches small, using an immersion blender, or pulse on the food processor in lieu of mashing them.
Most of my preserves get used in PB&J sandwiches or pancake toppings. The above method won’t work for sandwiches as it is way too runny. It will work ok for pancakes, but will really shine in yogurt.
Method 3: wholeheartedly recommend
The next recipe I tried, also from the National Center for Home Food Preservation, is Spiced Blueberry-Peach Jam. The sugar ratio is 8 cups fruit: 5.5 cups sugar.
OMG. The flavor is SO good. There’s a synergy between blueberry and peach that I wasn’t aware of. I like it so much I’ve made several batches so far.
But… I did run into a couple of issues on this one.
The first: I don’t have all of these spices whole on hand. I did have whole cloves on hand though. I made a small sachet with the cloves, and just substituted powdered for the rest. Unfortunately I completely forgot to take out the sachet, and I can’t tell which jar has it in there. I’m worried that the sachet will change the pH balance and render the product unsafe in the jar that it is in. It’s probably not a big deal, but I made a note on all of these jars to check for the sachet when opening so I can throw that jar out. For my next several batches, I simply ground the cloves in my molcajete so that I didn’t forget to take a sachet out. Ground spices worked fine. Though… it is difficult to say how much to use. I just used about four dashes cinnamon, a small dash allspice, and about 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves.
The second: this recipe doesn’t use pectin, and the product can be runny if you don’t cook long/hot enough. The recipe says to heat the mixture 9 degrees over the boiling point of water (which would be 221) OR until it thickens. I find that it takes a looong time to get there and it is hard to know when it is thick enough.
It took about 10 minutes to get to the point in this photo, and I’m not sure how high the temp really got to. The end product is sufficiently thick enough. If you attempt this recipe, be prepared to boil it hard, stirring constantly, for at least 10 minutes to reduce the mixture down enough.
What have you been preserving?
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Great post! Thank you! (and I love Morning Shade - just down the road, I have been picking there for years, multiple times each season :-) )
I have one Toro blueberry and agree that the flavor is very bland. My favorite: Darrow.