Simon deSwaan appreciates a lot about living in Colorado. The beautiful mountains, the hiking trails, the community. But one thing in particular stands above all else: the Palisade peach.
“The shining star of moving to Colorado are Colorado Palisade peaches,” he said recently at home in Eagle, Colorado. “And I say that genuinely.”
Palisade peaches are the it produce of Colorado. They hail from the Western Slope, where hot, dry days combined with cool nights help the fruit develop their rich, distinctive, outrageously good flavor. They’re known to cause a bit of a frenzy every year when they hit market stands throughout the state. But they haven’t yet hit those market stands, and that has deSwaan just a little bit worried.
“Every year I look for the peach stand,” he said. “I've been watching for the stand now going on about two weeks, and it's not there. And I'm wondering where it is.”
Palisade peaches are, indeed, a major highlight of summer in Colorado. The fruit thrives in hot, sunny weather. But this year came with an unusually cold and wet start to the growing season.
On top of that, devastating reports of near-total crop loss have been trickling in from other big peach states, such as Georgia and South Carolina, where late frosts and other unusual weather have left local peach lovers bereft.
With fruit this good, it’s only natural to have a little bit of Palisade peach anxiety in the run-up to the season, but this year, circumstances have only intensified that feeling among those who are prone to it.
I explained the phenomenon to Harrison Topp, an organic peach grower in Paonia, Colorado, who was able to offer a little perspective. He said peach anxiety is entirely misplaced this year. After an initially cool spring, the peach capital of Colorado has had ideal conditions for fruit development.
“We're hot and dry and coming along real nicely over here,” Topp said. “We're looking at one of the strongest crops we've had in years.”
Sure enough, on a recent afternoon, the air and the trees at Kokopelli Farm and Produce, a 50-acre orchard in Palisade, Colorado, are heavy with fruit, just starting to come ripe.
“The crop’s good,” Orchard Manager Aaron Harrison confirmed. “Everything's looking really nice.”
Farmworkers equipped with harnesses and crates scan the trees for the ripest peaches, skipping over many that still need time to tree-ripen.
“Right now, we're just selective picking anything that is big and colorful,” Harrison explained. They’ll do another pass on this row of trees in a few days.
“Once the sun decides to do its thing and the trees start to do their thing, and we’ve got big, ripe fruit, we’ll go through and pick everything,” Harrison explained.
He expects all that picking to add up to about 30,000 boxes of peaches this year, an excellent haul for this orchard.
Peach lovers will have to wait just a little bit longer than usual to sink their teeth into one of them, according to Bruce Talbott, of Talbott’s Mountain Gold, one of Colorado’s biggest peach growers. That’s because of the lasting effect of that cool, wet spring.
“The issue for us is that the season is about a week later than average,” Talbott said. “And we aren’t going to be in the markets quite as early as we usually are.”
That delay explains the mystery of Simon deSwaan’s missing peach stand.
“I'm still looking,” deSwaan said. Yesterday I drove by and I'm craning my neck going, When is this peach stand coming?”
It’s coming, Simon. It’s coming very soon. Palisade peaches, in all their sun-ripened glory, will start hitting grocery stores and farmers markets across the state within the week, just ever so slightly later than usual.
