I love even the nastiest fruit, like for instance green picked mealy walmart peaches that dont even hold a candle to home grown fresh picked.
Its the difference between tomatoes from walmart versus from my garden. No comparrison.
That said, different sugar/flavor profiles of different categories appeal to different people. I like both, but I prefer lots of flavor and less sugar.
Bottom line: the commercial fruit is the bottom of the barrell, if only for the fact of not being tree ripened.
Then for Olpea he is dealing with climate freezing the crop too so success and dependability is part of the picture depending on your climate.
I’m not a fan of nectarines. I find the aroma of peaches more pleasant. Nectarines are also squishier. They also taste too sweet, whereas with peaches you get more flavor.
california peaches from a supermarket in eugene OR. ranged from mealy to incredible
farm stand peaches grown in eugene OR and salem OR. they were ok, not great. I only got early redhaven and springcrest though so not the best comparison vs. the main season stuff
farm stand peaches grown in hood river OR (east side, dry, a really great growing area). incredible across the board
my home grown peaches, eugene OR. ranged from from good to incredible
the best grocery store california peaches were actually almost the equal of the hood river farm stand peaches or my home grown ones, and they were 99 cents/lb too. but quality was hit-or-miss. still, when I got some of the really good batches I went back for more, and they made me question why I grow at home at all. You guys living far away from california are missing out, we appear to get some that are picked nearly ripe and end up ripened to perfection on arrival (only one day’s journey). not always, but often enough
Honestly, this thread blows my mind. First, to you folks saying you often get really good quality peaches at the grocery store, I say you are incredibly lucky. I have never bought one singe grocery store peach which even came close to my worst home grown ones- I relied on store bought for the first 40 years of my life! I’m not sure if my stores just do a much worse job or what, but around here, store bought peaches are barely edible. Even when soft, they usually are mealy.
To the OP, I do understand what you are saying…if I read the reviews you speak of I might get the same idea. But I’m 99.9% sure that both Scott and Olpea will come along and say that the vast majority of their tree ripened peaches are far far better than store bought. The thing you need to remember is that when they say “isn’t good” or “doesn’t taste great” and so on, they mean COMPARED TO OTHER TREE RIPENED PEACHES. I’d bet that if the reviews were using store bought peaches as the standard- and they aren’t- then every variety reviewed would get great reviews.
Trust me, the difference in a home grown, tree ripened peach of ALMOST any variety blows away almost any store bought peach. Its not even close. In fact, my favorite thing in the whole world is giving a good home grown, tree softened peach to someone who has only had store bought peaches. As they bite into it and the juice runs down their arm, they get this look on their face that is so fun, and they almost always say something like “could I grow these at my house too?” or at least “do sell these”. In other words, they immediately start trying to figure out how to acquire more of this incredible treat that they have been missing their whole life. I have never, ever- not once- had someoen say “that’s good but I’ve had store bought ones before that were almost as good”. no. its like they have discovered a whole new fruit.
Have you ever bought fruit from Costco? They have a very good distribution system that allows them to sell “tree ripened” fruit, meaning picked about 5 days before it would get soft on the tree- of course that doesn’t mean the grower didn’t water the fruit down by over irrigating the orchard to get maximum weight at the expense of brix, but the last time I had no fruit my wife purchased a box of fantastic, very high brix nectarines from them. Next time she bought some no-acid white ones that were fine but far from great.
I also get good fruit for a premium price at a high end market near me. They charge $5 a pound for their version of “tree ripened” fruit. The few times I’ve purchased it it has been good, even the apricots, which don’t take well to picking early.
I’ve also gotten very good pluots- they were bred to be able to pick hard and still be very sweet. Hit and miss from very good to mediocre.
According to your palate, maybe. Nectarines tend to have higher brix and more acid which to many palates equates more flavor. I can appreciate the textural preference for peaches, but if I had to choose just one, it is my tree ripened, high brix nectarines.
Luckily we have a few “fruit stand” type specialty places here. They drive to South Carolina and bring back far better peaches every few days during the summer. They beat the socks off of anything at any of the local grocery stores…
I haven’t tried Costco fruit, so maybe they really are different. And I will say that I’ve had some really good plums and plumcots from stores, so I’m with you on those. But peaches…just awful at the stores we have around here. I am sure this is why a new company called the “Georgia Peach Truck” has been so successful. They preannounce locations in cities all around the southeast and let people know they will be there on a certain day and time. People literally line up in unbelievable lines and the prices are mind blowing high, but people buy them because they are so much better than store-bought. That being said, they still have to be picked hard to make the trip and so still aren’t nearly as good as tree-ripened soft ones grown locally. But I get your point!
Hopefully it’s somewhat better in your part of the South, but when I lived in SE Arkansas, the grocery stores put much more thought and care into the curation of their bacon selection than fresh produce, especially fruit. I would have been shocked to find a good peach, except maybe at the Super Walmart. There was an awesome local produce stand, but I don’t recall them having any fruit.
I’m not convinced that chingchungly is even interested in growing fruit. Most of us find the peaches we grow vastly superior to what we can usually buy and he is focused on a couple of posts by members who were not comparing their fruit with purchased fruit at all. They were comparing new varieties with their favorite ones.
Growing fruit is first and foremost for people who enjoy gardening. Many start with growing vegetables and graduate to fruit.
No…if anything its worse here. And like you said, pretty much all produce is bad in stores here, but peaches are worst of all. As I told @alan, I have found some good plums and pluots on occassion, but never a decent peach.
You would think that we would have wonderful supermarket peaches here, since it’s only a couple hours away from California’s prime peach growing areas, but not so. I don’t know where Ralph’s and Albertson’s get their peaches, but they start out green and hard as a rock, then go straight to mealy with wrinkly skin, without ever a stop at just ripe in between.
The farmer’s markets do have good peaches here, but they are expensive and only available in season, when I already have an abundance of fruit on my trees at home.
I refuse to buy stonefruit from the grocery store here --i swear they refrigerate them or something and it destroys the texture or they just buy the worlds crappiest fruit. Sometimes i find really good nectarines at walmart, buts its hit or miss. I’m pretty much canned peaches or frozen fruit at this point// i do buy citrus and some berries (in season) fresh.
Keep in mind peaches are early to bear fruit with getting fruit in their second or 3rd year. As a result you won’t be using much time. A peach will also swiftly decline though. A peach tree lifespan is 8-12 years in the commercial industry and will often be in too deep of decline in 20 some years to keep. Meanwhile apples, pears, many nut trees will live 50 through hundreds of years.
Yes Kevin, that is exactly right. One thing I’ve noticed is that taste standards move up, as one is exposed to better tasting food, at least as this relates to fruit.
I’ve seen this over and over with customers. A new peach customer will rave about any peach they’ve purchased from me, saying it’s the best peach they’ve ever had. This might be the first of the season when peaches have received a lot of rain and the sweetness isn’t where I’d like it to be.
But the peaches they received are melting, very juicy with lots of peach flavor. Sometimes I’ll warn customers these aren’t our best peaches because they aren’t that sweet. But newer customers will come back, look at my like I’m crazy, and say the peaches were fantastic.
Then when these same customers get our peaches from the middle of the season when there has been dry weather and lots of sun/blazing heat, they rave even more about those. Then towards the end of the season when the sweetness goes down because days are getting shorter and more precip, the same customers (when I ask them about the peaches they got last week) will say they were good, but not as good as the ones they got three weeks ago.
I’ve seen this over and over.
Once I had a guy who was new working for me. I was trying to train him on picking peaches and had him taste a peach that I knew was unacceptable selling quality for our orchard. It was from a third picking and although juicy, wasn’t very good (compared to what we normally sell). He tried it and thought it was a good peach. I then picked a peach I knew was good and had him try a bite out of that one. He could immediately recognize it was a far superior tasting peach.
People just don’t realize good food until they’ve had it. That is not a put down, because everyone is there at some point in their lives. The old cliche’, “You don’t know what you don’t know” is never more apt than when it comes to judging good quality fruit that one has never had.
I’m for sure not saying the OP has never had great quality peaches, simply that fruit standards for taste move up significantly as one is exposed to better quality fruit.
Regardless of one’s religion (or lack thereof) perhaps a lesson can be taken from one of C.S. Lewis’ fictional children’s books (The Last Battle) where Lewis is trying to describe Heaven (in his own way, and to children) from the perspective of a fictional character who has visited it, to another fictional character who has not.
“What was the fruit like? Unfortunately, no one can describe a taste. All I can say is that, compared with those fruits, the freshest grapefruit you’ve ever eaten was dull, and the juiciest orange was dry, and the most melting pear was hard and woody, and the sweetest wild strawberry was sour. And there were no seeds or stones, and no wasps. If you had once eaten that fruit, all the nicest things in this world would taste like medicines after it. But I can’t describe it. You can’t find out what it is like unless you can get to that country and taste for yourself.”
For sure standards go up once you have tasted home grown.
Tomatoes, Pears, peaches figs, etc are picked green for the most part and have no way to match the sugars and flavor of fruit picked at actual ripening.
Another factor is that most of us don’t grow the types that are in the stores. I don’t think anyone grows apples to have a fuji or Granny Smith. We are often trying varieties that are unique and are not common at retail. So tasting a new, hyped variety can sometimes by disappointing due to expectations. The first time I tasted Celeste fig (the best of the South), I thought it was just OK, but it was still MILES better than any fresh fig I’ve found in the stores.
My Chagsha mandarin that I picked last night was decent for my standards, but if I bought I bag of those in the store, rather than the dry mandarins that circulate, I would be quite happy. It’s just that I expect more from trees that I’ve taken care of, and tried to harvest at the perfect time.
That’s for sure. I bought some California peaches at Costco NY that were picked two weeks before I bought them and they where still hard and almost tasteless. They did look good.
I don’t think I’ve said a fruit tastes fantastic in more than 20 years. I am so used to “fantastic” that it is now my flavor standard. The more you sample the more discerning you become. I’ve grown about 1500 varieties of tomatoes. When I started 40 years ago, I thought Rutgers was a really good tomato. Today I would tell you that Rutgers is still a good tomato, but there are many that taste better and produce better. Tomatoes are subject to the same vagaries of weather that peaches and other fruit experience. Too much rain can make them watery and insipid. Too little rain and production is cut.
More important to me is knowing how productive a plant will be. I’ve had Brandywine tomatoes that were easily 9.5 on a scale of 1 to 10, but I only got a dozen fruits from a plant. I’ve had Akers West Virginia that gave 30 fruit in the 12 ounce size range and all of them would have been 9.75 on the flavor scale. I would grow Akers in a heartbeat because it gives both production and flavor. I see this same discrimination in Olpea’s posts where it is not just important to taste good but also to be productive.
I do think there is something to the store bought varieties. Many people will claim a honeycrisp apple home grown is far sweeter than store bought honeycrisp. Some say Fuji apples are so sweet home grown that they end up being too sweet. I do agree I have gotten burned on a lot of stuff that is not commercially grown. I tried mulberries which people rave about the taste and to me they just tasted like sugar water for example. Fine for some but I like a little more taste. Peaches are similar tasting if you compare yellow to yellow, white to white or donut to donut. Apples have a lot of variation and will taste different so will be hard to compare