2021 turning out just peachy for perfect crop

BELLEVILLE, Ill. — Despite some late spring freezes, this year has seen a bumper crop of Illinois peaches.

“We dodged a bullet twice,” said Tom Range, owner, with his wife, Pat, of Braeutigam Orchards in Belleville.

The orchard has a range of peach trees that bloom and produce fruit at different times so the orchard has a nearly continuous supply of peaches from June through the end of August.

But two late spring cold weather events had Range wondering how much of a crop he would have.

“We had peaches in bloom and we had snow and ice on them,” Range said.

Range, who, with his wife, took over Braeutigam Orchards in 1980 from Pat’s parents, has learned that even a frost or snow doesn’t necessarily mean the end of the crop.

“You cannot tell on the day of a freeze whether you are going to have a crop or not. You have to let nature work it’s way out,” Range said.

This year, the late cold spells happened at just the right times for the peaches.

“When that first freeze came, the blooms weren’t fully open, they were in the ‘popcorn’ stage, you could see the leaves, but the pistil wasn’t exposed yet and, at 31 degrees, it wasn’t cold enough to hurt them. Then the second freeze, two weeks later, they were past bloom,” Range said.

Range said he is pleased with the year’s crop of peaches.

“This year, we have a 100% crop of peaches. There’s a lot of them on the trees,” he said.

The peach crop at Braeutigam Orchards starts with Flamin’ Fury, which comes on strong in mid to late June. The different varieties of peaches ripen sequentially throughout the summer, finishing with Encore, which becomes available around the last week of August.

Below-zero temperatures are the enemy of peach trees. Sustained below freezing temperatures, especially below-zero temperatures, can cause damage to the trees themselves and can end a crop before it’s barely started.

“The critical temperature is zero. Anytime you go below zero, you have a chance of either killing the bud before it is even open or you can do tree damage. You can lose a peach crop in January and not even realize it’s being lost,” Range said.

While the weather in southern Illinois has always been conducive to growing peaches, with milder winters, Range said those winters have been getting even milder.

“We used to figure that you lose one crop in five years. Now, the last several years, we usually lose one in seven or eight years. The winters have just been milder,” Range said.