Page 7 - Leisure Living Magazine July 2019

Peaches 2019 - The Glass Half Full
By Brad Schwan, Schwan Orchards, Catawba Island
When I was a young man my mother had a friend who had a peach orchard on Catawba Is- land. She had a standing order for a big bunch of peaches each year which would turn into several of my favorite peach pies. I can vividly remem- ber the annual question “How are the peaches this year?” I found this didn’t mean “How do they taste?” Often the reply was, “No peaches this year”. Subconsciously I came to understand the fragile nature of this endeavor. Perhaps that chal- lenge is what drew me to grow peaches myself.
Until the early 1900’s, Catawba Island was known for its fabulous grape production. By 1915 almost the entire township was a mass of peach orchards. The majority of those survived until the 1950’s when land values provided the aging farmers a nice way to exit the temperamen- tal vocation.
Today there are only a few of us brave (or foolish) peach farmers to continue the Catawba peach tradition. We face the same trials that our predecessors did. This year, for example, there were two nights in January that dipped to minus eight degrees. Those two nights of extra cold cost us about fifty percent of this year’s crop. Peach trees’ fruit buds are actually on the trees the year before they produce and at that temperature half of the buds were killed. Several years ago, the temperatures dropped to minus eighteen. That year almost every tree over six years old died. They froze to death!
Most local residents realize how extremely wet this year has been! Yards and fields have ei- ther been flooded or too wet to plant. Peach trees can not tolerate wet roots and will die with as lit- tle as two days of standing water. High ground or hillsides are great locations to plant trees as the natural drainage helps to avoid this water is- sue. In our case, we are not lucky enough to have either of those terrain features and many of our trees are paying the price. At this point it looks like about fifty of our trees will shrivel up and die.
So is our glass half empty or half full? For us it is half full! We still have plenty of healthy trees that will still produce plenty of beautiful peach-
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These beautiful peaches will be enjoyed this summer.
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