How Sweet It Is
We said they were cool. Would you believe cold? But even a late freeze can’t dampen our enthusiasm for peaches, the juiciest crop of the summer.
(Page 2 of 2)
Harley, 73, and Lawrence, 63, claim to be retired (Alvin passed away in 1999), having handed the reins to Lawrence’s daughter, Luana Priess, and her husband, Ricky. But the brothers can’t stay away from the family’s farm stand for long. That’s where I caught up with them back in 2001, just as a trailerload of Lorings arrived to begin their journey through the forty-foot-long grading machine, a contraption that marries the beauty of automation with human judgment.
As the peaches jostled down the grader’s first conveyor belt, the overripe and severely blemished were culled by hand. Those that made the cut were then defuzzed with water and spinning brushes. Next, the buffed beauties danced along a section of rotating sponges that gently dried them before another conveyor belt carried them through a second gauntlet of inspection. Like proud parents, Lawrence and Ricky searched for the slightest imperfections; just a dab of infectious brown rot on one peach can spread through a bushel of the fruit faster than gossip in a small town. Finally, the survivors—the Gold standard, if you will—were sorted by size in an ingenious device that reminded me of a carnival game, with a grinning Harley checking the fruit one last time for nearly microscopic defects. Throughout the entire process, the three men appeared on the verge of giggling.
I have to confess that, until I saw the magical grading machine, I didn’t understand how peach farming could appeal to anyone but a die-hard masochist, even in the best of times. Sure, as I toured the Golds’ lush orchards, with their trees lined up precisely, like a vast, bright-green army, I thought how cool it would be to coax bounty from the earth and all that. But any romantic notions I had died when the talk turned to root rot and other diseases, creepy insects like stinkbugs, drought, floods, hailstorms, too few chilling hours (between 32 and 45 degrees) to set the fruit and too few sunny days to sweeten it—not to mention those cruel late freezes.
And that’s not all: You have to wait four years after planting the trees to harvest your first crop. The real kicker, though, was learning that, in those rare years when everything comes together perfectly and the trees are heavily burdened with fruit, about a fourth of the baby peaches must be plucked or shaken off for the sake of the others. Murder! And if you think I’m neurotically tenderhearted, even Jim Kamas, a fruit specialist with the Texas Cooperative Extension, likens the task to “stepping on chicks.”
The Golds’ work doesn’t stop in the orchard or at the grading machine. Lynette, Lawrence’s wife, sets a breakneck pace in the farm stand’s kitchen, which, on the day I visited, was as spotless as one in a model home even though she and her two helpers were busily canning preserves, feeding homemade peach ice cream into the soft-serve machine, and baking a couple dozen pies. Luana was also in the kitchen that day, but she didn’t look comfortable in this dauntingly domestic scene. “There’s no place she’d rather be than out in the orchard with her father, driving the tractor or whatever,” Lynette explained. “She’s the son we never had.” This make-believe son, however, was gal enough to be a duchess in the JAMboree Peach Court of 1985. Just don’t ask her to taste the cash crop. “I love to work with peaches,” Luana confessed, “but I hate to eat them.”
And they say irony is dead, I thought, as I polished off my second piece of pie. This family sideline—Lynette’s brainchild, born four years ago—has taken off faster than you can say “flaky cinnamon crust.” During the JAMboree, they sell more than sixty pies a day. Luckily, Lynette, a petite woman with the energy of a hummingbird and the rainy-day instincts of the proverbial ant, is prepared for this year’s crop flop. When I checked in with her in April, she assured me that if, as expected, Gillespie County peaches are scarcer than minimalist B&B’s this summer, there will still be pies aplenty. Her five big freezers are packed with more than a thousand gallons of bagged and labeled peaches that she has stockpiled in better years. She even has enough to sell to the Stonewall Chamber of Commerce so they’ll have something to serve with the ice cream at this year’s JAMboree (June 20 and 21).
But even at the 2001 JAMboree, the peach pickings were shockingly slim: store-bought ice cream topped with frozen peaches, doughy cobbler, peach freezes with more vanilla than fruit. No shortage of nachos and sausage-on-a-stick, though (maybe Luana was in charge of the food). I envied the pie-and-cobbler judges, who were happily sampling dozens of entries, safely cordoned off from peach-deprived fairgoers like me.
Cleansing their palates with soda crackers between bites, the lucky judges rated the contenders on appearance, peachiness, and crust. Betty Nebgen, who was standing nearby—she was in charge of the contest for 21 years before passing the mantle to Marjorie Otte in 2000—explained the rules to me: No pie or cobbler can include ingredients that require refrigeration, like cream cheese, and entries are disqualified if the taste of peaches is overwhelmed by, say, too many almonds or, in the case of one entry a few years ago, Red Hots. “The Red Hots gave the pie a real pretty color,” said a diplomatic Nebgen, “and it tasted real good. But not like peaches.”
Maybe I could get my piece of the pie at the festival’s peach auction, I thought, where the top winners in all the categories—from fresh peaches to jams and jellies—are sold to the highest bidder (a portion of the proceeds goes to the chamber of commerce). But when I watched the heaviest peach go for a whopping $500 and the prettiest one for a princely $600, I realized that my chances of snagging even the fifth-place cobbler were hopeless. I wonder, though, if I’d known then what I know now—that Texas peaches are fragile treasures that we should never take for granted—would any price have seemed too high?
Pages: 1 2
My Library
