Peach Tree Grown From Seed - First Harvest!

On October 2nd, 2016, I started some peach seeds in an attempt to grow some peach trees from some store-bought peaches. This video is the culmination of five years worth of work, or almost five years worth of work, we're at month 59, to take some store-bought peaches, plant their seeds, grow them into trees, have the trees flower and fruit, and kind of get an idea if we got something edible, something tasty, or something completely different. Hey everyone, it's Rob the Backyard Gardener, and that's right, in today's video we're going to go ahead and take a look at my peach tree that I've grown from seed. It's at 59 months, almost five years old. We set flowers back in March on my last update, and we did set flowers and actually had a chance at fruit last year, but the small peaches fell off of the buds or fell off the tree, and we never actually got a harvestable fruit. This year we set several more flowers, and I've been excited to go ahead and do a harvest, but for some reason this peach tree has taken forever to have ripened fruit on the tree. Now my other two peach trees actually have fruit that's ripe to pick in June and July. This one I've been waiting patiently on, and as we've harvested the other peaches on the other trees, we've left this peach tree exposed to all the squirrels, birds, you name it. Everything knows that they're there, and they're being not even patient anymore. They're just eating the peaches off the tree. So I've got to harvest them, and we've got to see if we can go ahead and get some pulled off here before I have nothing that I can harvest on the very first season or the very first fruiting season of this tree, and I just want to get an idea what kind of fruit we have on this bad boy so that I know if this is going to be stuff that we can eat down the road or if we have something that we grew from seed that's not that great. I'll tell you I've been spot checking over the last several weeks, and these peaches have been hard as a rock. There's no peach scent. The peaches are very solid, but over the last couple of days, they've really expedited their ripening process, and the pests have found that out for sure. I'm rambling, but I'm just excited because this is one of the whole reasons why I like growing from seed. You never know what you're going to get, and I'm super excited to try these out. Let's go take a look at this peach tree. There's a lot of plum curculio damage. There's pest damage, but there are some harvestable fruits, and that's what I'm looking to grab off the tree today. So the peach tree I've grown from seed took forever to get these peaches to even ripen, and in the process of having to wait, I've had a lot of squirrels and birds and you name it take bites out of them. You can see the carnage on the ground. I mean, they eat them even when they're not fully ripe at this point, and I've lost a lot of the peaches on this tree, and at some point we've got to cut our losses and pick them a little bit early. I went to touch this peach that was on it, and it literally fell into my hands. So it's not the softest, but I think over a few days on the counter it will be, and it does have some of those curculio or plum curculio holes. So we'll have to see how much is edible inside, and it's even got a dry leaf on the outside. Either way, we do have some probably harvestable peaches, and I want to get this on film before I lose them all, since I just keep losing some to pests. And there's still a handful of peaches on this tree, but like I said, the longer I wait to get them fully ripe, the more the pests eat them. And this is the one that I have grown from seed, and I'm curious to do a taste test on these peaches. So let me go do a quick little harvest and just take off all of the peaches that look like they are edible. The ones that aren't edible like that I'll probably just leave on the tree, and then I'll need to once again pick up all of the waste down here. This is just from the last week. A week ago there was nothing down here, and they started to ripen finally in this last week, and because it's the only fruit tree I have back here that has fruit on it, they're going bonkers for it. All right, let me do a quick harvest. We'll rinse them off, show you what I got. So unfortunately, the waste peaches in all the pits outnumber the ones I'm willing to take a chance on. Stuff like that obviously is rotting away, but it looks like it could be a good peach, and I can always cut that away. I'm going to let it sit on the counter for just about a day. Anything more than that, this thing will spread and deteriorate rapidly. Anyway, those are probably the ones I'm willing to take a chance on, and these are the ones I'm just going to toss. I am probably going to keep a couple of the pits because it might be fun to grow a gen 2 series, basically taking the seeds out of these and seeing what kind of handful of peach trees would grow from these seeds. We'll see though. We'll see. Either way, I'm going to let these sit on the counter for a day. I'm going to rinse them off. We'll come back, and we'll do a cut open and taste test and see how the peach tree grown from seed peaches taste. Again, I know it's a pathetic harvest, but this is the first year that it actually set fruit that I could eat. This is just the first year. The fruit won't taste as well. Probably took longer to mature, things like that. I'm not expecting much from this, but if it's edible and tastes good, that's a good start for its first fruit bearing season. All right, I'll be back in a couple of days. Well, one or two days, and we'll see how that tastes. So I thought I'd start by first showing you what the two ripe peaches look like. Obviously, most of these peaches have some sort of damage on them, but these two look the best. They're the most ripe. I figured I'd take the best of the two, the most intact of the two. There is some damage, and just give it a little cut open. Typically, I would just bite into these like an apple or peach, but because of the amount of damage, I'm going to cut it into some wedges just to make sure I don't eat any curculio worms, if you will, and that's a problem I'm going to have to address sometime between now and the start of next year. Now, right here, this looks pretty good to me. Looks pretty juicy. We do have the darker tone where it's riper around the seed, and enough lollygagging. Let's take a bite. Now, I'm going to voice over my eating here, but honestly, these are very sweet and very juicy. I was surprised at how much flavor that it actually had, considering I had to ripen it on the counter. Just for fun, I'm going to go ahead and cut another wedge, make sure that we have the same flavor. I'm pretty much guaranteeing that we will, but I want to make sure I get a full gamut of the taste, if you will. I'll cut this little piece off here since it's a little bit of a bruise, but I'll try this one next and see how it goes. So, definitely very flavorful for the first year being harvested. Now, in this last clip, I just wanted to show, A, that I am going to save some of these peach seeds. That way, we can try to grow a Gen 2 one. Not sure I'll do it right away, but sometime in the next few months. I also cut a few more wedges just to give you an example off a different peach, how juicy they actually are. And again, overall, I'm pretty happy with the taste, the color, the scent for this first year peach tree harvest. So, there you have it, everyone. That's my peach tree grown from seed series wrap-up. It doesn't mean that this series won't continue because I want to see what kind of fruit we get next year. I've really got to do a good job of getting that clay spray or some kind of protectant to really hedge against the number of plum curculio pest problems I have. I don't mind sharing a peach or two with the squirrels and the birds. I really don't, but when I lose half my harvest to the plum curculio, that's annoying. And it used to be worse. We used to lose almost the entire harvest. Anyway, we're going to work on that for next year. I can't wait to see. I have a couple of other peaches in the ground, and you'll recall we had a flower but no fruit on one of my other peach trees. So, next year, another one that I've grown from seed should also have some flowers and fruits, and we'll provide updates on that at a different date. Anyway, if you enjoyed this peach tree grown from seed series, I'd appreciate that thumbs up. And as always everyone, happy gardening, and thanks for watching. Man, it's hot out!