By Clint Thompson
Early-season peaches will be sporadic this year thanks to a late-season freeze event in mid-March. The quality and quantity of early peach varieties is in doubt as a result.
Jeff Cook, University of Georgia Cooperative Extension agriculture and natural resources (ANR) agent for Peach and Taylor counties, discussed the situation facing his growers.
“It depends on location. We’ve got peaches across the board, but it’s like, you have a full crop here and not a full crop there,” Cook said. “The good thing about the peaches that we have, I am still seeing sprayers running. In 2023, we got into this time of year, and it was hard to find a peach sprayer in a field spraying anything.
“It’s location dependent, variety dependent and in some of the farms, it left a lot more stems on the tree.”
Peach Thinning
This is normally the time of year when peach producers thin their trees, reducing the number of fruit while increasing the size of the fruit remaining on the trees. That process has been made difficult with the quality of fruit that is still hanging on the trees.
“They’re still in the decision-making time. They’re looking at peaches going, ‘It looks like a peach, it cuts like a peach, but I’m not 100% convinced it is a good peach.’ You’ve got to figure out what you leave on a tree; what do you trust is going to make a peach,” Cook said. “We’re in the period of time where we’ve got to thin and they’re trying to figure out, ‘Do I thin these? Do I leave them because half of them are going to fall off?’
“We don’t want to pull the wrong fruit off, but if you leave them, then you’re looking at small peaches across the board, and nobody wants that either.”