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["Dave Griffin" <griffingardens@earthlink.net>]

I have always blamed the poor taste and texture of store peaches and nectarines on early picking as well, but it may be worse than just that one commercial consideration that accounts for this. Last summer I was able to tour a test orchard for new and not so recent but modern commercial cultivars and participated in the evaluation of about 20 ripe varieties which we picked off the tree. It wasn't long before I began to notice that what we were tasting were all very similar to each other and also very much like what I had tasted from the grocery store. Let me repeat, we were picking these right off the trees. The only time I tasted anything that was beginning to be sweet and juicy was when I wandered off to trees that had most of their fruit on the ground and then, when I would remark that this one was pretty good, I was told not to pay any attention to it as it was past. I left the station very disappointed in what I had expected to be a magnificent day of indulgent peach pleasure, but with my eyes opened to the painful truth: it is the large, beautiful, firm, red commercial peaches that are bad, not when they pick them. Stopping at a friend's place on the way home I had the best peach of the day, by far. His neighbor had a seedling tree that came from a Reliance pit and the fruit was much like it - small, yellow, fuzzy, sweet, juicy, with amazing flavor and aroma, and so soft you couldn't have shipped it across the street. But then why would you have wanted to?

 

Dave

MN, zone 4a

 

 

----- Original Message -----

From: Ginda Fisher

To: North American Fruit Explorers

Sent: 1/22/06 10:21:57 PM

Subject: [NAFEX] grocery store peaches and nectarines

On Jan 22, 2006, at 10:37 PM, road's end farm wrote:

On Jan 22, 2006, at 8:46 PM, Spidra Webster wrote:

For the last several years I've found that store nectarines are a 

better bet than peaches.  But the last season or so nectarines have 

seemed just as bad.  I hardly got a good peach this summer but I think 

it might be due to the fact that I wasn't getting out to the Farmer's 

Market or gourmet stores enough. 

Grocery store peaches are almost always terrible as they're almost always picked too green. If you wait till they're close enough to ripe so that they'll develop full flavor, they're too close to ripe to ship very far.

Many many years ago I did a brief stint picking peaches in Washington State, while wandering around the country. We were told that we might as well eat the ripe ones, they couldn't be shipped anyway. A revelation. Probably one reason I'm farming today.

--Rivka

Finger Lakes NY; zone 5 

All in all, I usually prefer grocery store peaches to grocery store nectarines.  But it's a crap shoot.  The best "peach" I ever had was a nectarine several years ago, and this year we got a batch of terrific nectarines.  We also got some really excellent peaches form the local produce place, though.  Even the locally grown ones vary a lot.  they were only excellent for a week and a half, both earlier and later they were just so-so.  I'm sure the local farmers grow more than one type, and I'd guess that only one cultivar was both an excellent cultivar and also arrived ripe in the store.

Ginda

eastern Mass., zone 6