By Clint Thompson
Last week was a welcome sight for Alabama’s peach producers. Multiple cold days in a row allowed the state’s peach trees to catch up in accumulating chill hours.
Edgar Vinson, assistant research professor and Extension specialist in the Department of Horticulture at Auburn University, provided an outlook on where chilling stands in the state.
“We were quite a bit concerned early on, because we started collecting chill and then the tap just shut off. We weren’t collecting any, and we were a good bit behind where we were last year at this time,” Vinson said. “After the recent cold weather, we collected quite a bit of chill hours. We’re pretty much on par with where we were last year.
“Looks like we’ve got quite a bit to collect in our forecast, too.”
Vinson said there were 185 chill hours recorded in Chilton County during the first week in December in 2023. This year that total was 186.
Peaches need chill hours with temperatures between 32- and 45-degrees Fahrenheit to mature. The required chill hours depend on the specific variety growers choose to plant. Some trees may require as little as 500 chill hours, while others may need between 900 and 1,000 chill hours. However, Vinson does not recommend that producers plant trees with that high of a chill-hour requirement.
“Over the last several years and the trouble we’ve been having with collecting chill hours, we haven’t really recommended that people plant anything above 900. It’s pretty much the cutoff,” Vinson said.
Chill hours are usually tallied through the middle of February.
“We’ve still got a few more months to go. There’s quite a bit of time for opportunities to collect some more chilling,” Vinson said.