A year after we moved to GA, I decided that if I lived in GA I just had to have a couple of peach trees. It just seems fitting to me to grow peaches in the peach state. Five years later I have yet to get very many peaches. I bought the trees at the end of the first summer on clearance and ddn't expect any fruit the next year as the roots established themselves. The third year we got some fruit off but it was small and had a lot of bugs in it. So last year I go down to our garden center and buy some pesticide to kill the bugs. We went out of town on Spring Break and when we returned home from South GA we discovered that a hard frost had occurred while we were gone. All of our peaches, kaput. 
This year spring comes around, and with it hope for a better harvest. However it looks grim once again! We woke up on saturday morning and looked outside to see...SNOW, IN GA, ON MARCH 8TH!!! It is tough to tell in this picture but it is snowing at a pretty good clip. We had another good freeze saturday night. I'm hoping some of the tighter blossoms will survive the freeze and we will get some fruit off these blasted trees this year!! Being a farmer is tougher than I thought.
6 comments:
Dan, I can understand the feeling. I planted a fruit tree for each of my kids when I moved into my house, they were planted before I planted anything else there. I lost the peach tree the first summer, it just could not stand the hot summer (I would guess it was the lack of grass in the yard and the lack of water it would have received if I would have had grass)all its leafs simply fell off.
4 yeas ago I cam home from the cabin to find my yard swing and my granny smith apple tree in my neighbors yard. Apparently we had a strong wind storm come through town and decapitated the apple tree right at the ground.
The pear tree produced a lot of fruit last year but it would never ripen, so we really did not enjoy that.
The remaining apple tree will produce fruit, but I can not keep the worms out of the fruit so I have never had more then a few apples a year off the tree.
Running a small orchard is hard work.
These are very sad tales of woe about fruit growing. I think we had the same problem in ID. Maybe you could pretend you are flower growers and just enjoy the blooms? And snow in Atlanta in March--where is the global warming?
I don't mean to laugh at your misfortune Dan and Mike, but your stories did just that. It makes me glad to know you are feeding your families thanks mostly to concrete money and not from your success in your orchards.
Thanks for sharing.
I guess I can't count on selling peaches if I want to retire early. On the other hand if Michael and I decide to have an orchard together we can get matching " I'm with Stupid " t-shirts!
That last comment made me laugh out loud--not something I usually do!
I am not sure how to react to my mother and soon to be twin brother laughing at my abilities to grow fruit trees. The fact that 2 1/2 of them are still alive is a great tribute to my ability to grow something besides tomatoes in my garden. BTW I have my chard seeds ready to go and 4 tomato plants growing in the house waiting for the winter frosts let up.
I do have more chokecherry trees/shrubs growing in my yard then the rest of you combined!!!! This little red hen might not share any of his choke cherry jelly with the rest of you!!!
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