Just Peachy

My parents have a peach tree that produced a lot of peaches this past summer. I took home a lot of them. We grilled some, we made peach salsa and some peach jelly. They were sweet and tart. 

At summers end, I decided to preserve a peach seed from one of my peaches and attempt to grow a new peach tree. Will it work? Well see.

I did some reading on the internet to learn a little bit about how to grow a peach tree. It sounded like a lot of work but it wasn’t so bad. I just have to give it room and let nature take it’s course. 

August- I placed a seed in a sealed baggie and placed it in my refrigerator. It needed a three to four month cold treatment to allow the embryo to develop and mature. I had to make sure to keep it away from other foods as peach seeds emit ethylene gas. Yes, peach seeds are poison. So are plums, cherries, apricots and nectarines. The seeds in these fruits contain cyanid compounds. If you swallow a seed you will be ok but they are poisonous when they are ground or crushed. 

November- I took the seed out of the refrigerator and carefully used a hammer and popped open the hull to reveal a tiny seed that looked like an almond. 

I placed the seed in another baggie along with some dirt. I just sealed it up and sat it in the window seal. After a couple weeks, I checked on it and was surprised to find a tiny peach tree! 

Just look at that! Isn’t it cute?

December- I removed it from the little baggie of dirt and planted it in a cup. Six days later it seems to be growing with a little help from a grow light. 

This red cup photo was taken on December 24th. On January 1st, it has grown even more!

Man! It is growing fast! I knew it would grow out of this red cup soon so I prepared a five gallon grow bag planter for a more permanent grow space.

I have to let it grow indoors until there is no threat of frost then I will be able to plant it in the yard in early spring. 

January- It loves the grow bag and has already grown a total of six inches tall in just one month. 

I have it placed at the back patio door where it can get some natural light through the blinds and on rainy days, I will plug in the little grow light. It’s fun to watch it lean back and forth and wiggle itself towards the light. I hope It will hang in there until I can plant it hopefully in March. My husband is going to find a spot in the back yard that will be easy for him to mow around come summer. 

I will be sure to give you an update when I have it planted in the yard. It will take an average of two years for it to start producing fruit but I’m not rushing it. Like I said “Nature will take its course”.

Aint that just peachy? 

Kites

As I was reading another blog post from a friend, It made me think about my childhood. Jack over on the ShipLog Blog wrote a post about homemade kites and how as a child he would fly kites made out of brown paper his dad would bring home from the dry cleaners. You can enjoy his post HERE.

This made me think about how I used to love it when momma would make us homemade kites. She would tell us to go find two straight sticks. This would get us out of her hair for a little while. We would run out into the woods and pick the perfect ones. Then we would bring the sticks into momma and she would make us a kite out of the daily news paper. If I can recall, she would use ribbon and bows for the tail. 

Sometimes they would fly and sometimes they wouldn’t but I would find an open area without any power lines or trees and take off running. The kite would often be bouncing on the ground behind me until a good wind would grab it and take it into the air. The open area I found was often just the dirt road in front of the house. Trees were all over but to an eight  year old, the space above my head was forever clear. 

The homemade kites never made it past a couple hours as either they would tear up from dragging the ground, fought over it with my sister and brothers or stuck in a tree. 

Now days I still like kites. I have a real store bought one at the beach that I keep in the camper just incase I want to fly it. It’s nothing fancy and its small but It’s fun to fly on the beach were It will reach sun.