Hard to get my head around the fact that we consumers will pay more for fresh tomatoes than peaches. Peaches are sooo much better of an eating experience. But i know this is all subjective, and pricing and purchasing patterns are way more complicated than that. Superficially, theres just a dissonance there for me.
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I see exactly the same thing.
Which is more valuable - a pound of homegrown tomatoes or a pound of homegrown peaches?
I hope most of my customers would say fresh peaches!
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The last farm in my area is now a condo development. Supermarkets sell beaches for 99 cents a lb but they are seldom edible. Local farmers markets set up on the weekend and over charge. A few peaches for $5, so $5 a lb. If I ask the variety they say yellow or white. I bought some flat peaches and they were terrible. Sad. We do have farms about 30 miles from here but haven’t been there in a few years so I don’t know their prices.
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I’m starting to pick my Contender peaches. They are exceptional in taste and size. We must have had a frost or freeze during the bloom time I was not aware of. Most of the peaches are all located in towards the middle of the tree, on both of the ones I have. My Redhaven only had one peach, one. It did taste really good though.
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We had a bad brown rot problem on Saturn and Contender, and I guessed wrong on when to harvest Red Haven. Said I, let’s give them two more days. Birds appreciated my decision and ruined the crop for all but home use. Nonetheless, overall it was our most successful peach year, especially from Rochester and Veteran. It was the first fruiting year for Madison. I like that peach.
In 2012, we planted a Harrow Diamond. This year it produced four peaches. HD is supposed to be the earliest good peach for this climate (NYS’s Finger Lakes), but those peaches have yet the ripen. I think what happened was after we had some bad tree damage several years ago, a below graft branch that I didn’t recognize as such must have been all that survived. Rootstock listed was simply “peach seedling.”
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Veteran and Madison are good choices, IMO, as well.