The Peach Tree

Growing up, my parents had a peach tree in our front yard and I always enjoyed eating those fresh peaches on a hot summer day. So when my wife and I hit upon the idea of planting an orchard instead of giving out favors at our wedding, I had to get a couple peach trees included. The day after our wedding we planted them out in the canary grass buffer behind all the farm buildings and pretty much forgot about them for the next 15 or so years. 

I guess the reason is that aside from the apple trees, they never produced a lot of fruit. The deer evidently love peach trees and kept them heavily pruned, killing the other one. Probably the same went for the two sour cherry trees we planted. One apple tree however did alright and we did pick some apples off it from time to time but that was the extent of our use of the orchard.

So when the garden fencing idea took fruition, we enclosed the old orchard remnants and I have kept it mowed this past year. With the deer now not welcome the old peach tree has shown its gratitude. The last time we were down on the farm, I picked all four peaches that it produced this year. Three of them were so bug eaten that we could only get one good bite on the far (good) side before tossing them. One peach was a specimen fruit that we used in a desert back home.

Here I am showing off the one bug eaten peach with my teeth marks in the good half. I ate a few more bites before giving it a toss. The nearly pristine peach is the one behind it. Although we haven't planted any more yet, I would like to plant a few more peach trees in the new orchard when we find some for the right price. They aren't real hardy trees this far north but if we got a handful of years of fruit out of them I would be happy.

 Thinking of Debby, I thought I would show this strip between our asparagus bed on the left and corn/potato patch on the right over looking the strawberry beds in the distance. One of the few times I have been able to mow this strip this year due to all the wet weather.