Feral wild hardy peach

My Grandpa lived in North east Nebraska and had a few native feral peach trees.  He called them "snow peaches"   they are small and fuzzy and hardy.   He would dig suckers and gift them to people.  He had one at his farmstead from the 1940s and the planted a sucker in his backyard when he moved to town in his retirement.   I always wanted to bring that tree to west central Wisconsin where I live.  After many years of digging suckers,  failed grafts, I finally have sprouted 4 seeds.

wanted to know if anyone else have seen these wild feral hardy peaches.

Josh

As a child, we used to drive our trash up the hill, and toss it over the edge of a cliff—city landfill. A few wild feral peaches grew from the face of the cliff—northern Utah.

There are many "feral" fruit trees growing on the walking tracks around the lakes in our district, mainly plums, apples and peaches that most likely sprouted from pits and/or stones discarded by walkers.

The feral peaches that grew on your grandfather's property may have only yielded small fruit if the trees had never been pruned and tended. Had the trees been fed, watered, thinned and pampered, the fruit would likely have grown much larger.

There is a delicious white fleshed peach grown from a stone in our community garden that I planted in 2016 that has crisp crunchy flesh when under ripe that ripens to extremely juicy, sweet fruit bursting with flavour with melting flesh.

There are photos of the white fleshed peach in this post  https://permies.com/t/120/23607/Propagating-Blood-cling-Peaches#1308051

Can you recall the colour of the skin and flesh, texture, whether it was cling or freestone, of your grandfather's peach tree?

There's something really appealing about a tree that just decided to grow there and thrive on its own. The ones that come up from discarded pits and survive without any care tend to be surprisingly tough. Worth growing on just to see what you get.

The fruit is freestone, and the flesh is more white than yellow.  

Sounds way better than the half dead, disease ridden peach trees that came with my house. They only exist for the honey bees at this point.

All 4 pits are now little saplings. I have some pics but I don't know how to upload to this thread

Welcome to Permies, Josh!

Follow this link to "How Permies Works"

I’ve had decent luck getting hardy peach seedlings through cold snaps by giving them a thick mulch ring and letting snow pile up as a natural blanket. The trick for me was picking the seedlings that shrugged off late frosts without turning to mush. If you’ve got a few sprouts going, I’d grow them side by side and keep the ones that bounce back fastest. Those tough little trees can surprise you.

This thread might be of interest to some folks:

https://permies.com/t/92682/peaches/Peaches-America-Invasive-Species-fascinating