YORK, S.C. (QUEEN CITY NEWS) – If you have plans for peaches on your plate this summer, they might be challenging to find, or at least not the homegrown ones.
A fourth-generation peach farmer in York County says her peach crop was devastated by a warm winter and a subsequent freeze in March.
On a good year, there would be a hundred peaches per tree.
“This tree we found has one peach,” said Beth White, owner of Black’s Peaches in York.
The business has been in business for 100 years, so they know how to adjust.
“It’s part of the job. You’re going to win some and lose some,” said White.
When a business depends on the weather, it always needs a backup.
“We kind of knew we might be headed for some trouble when it got so warm so early,” said White.
The owner of Black’s Peaches started noticing problems after a stretch of 70-degree days in February.
That put the peaches in full bloom about three weeks early, and then there was a freeze in mid-March.
“This year was the first year I’ve seen the blooms turn black almost instantly,” said White.
Only one out of every ten of their peaches will survive.
“Some of the best varieties got totally wiped out,” said White. “It hurt us pretty bad.”
Customers won’t be able to pick their own peaches at the farm this year.
“You might not be able to get the deals that you would normally get, but we’ll still have a few,” said White.
Workers at Black’s Peaches brought in carton after carton Tuesday after a farmer made a roughly three-hour round trip to McBee just so customers in York could have South Carolina peaches because, as everyone here will tell you, the state produces more peaches than Georgia.
“They do, and of course, better.”
And when there’s a bad year, fellow farmers help one another.
“We’re going to have peaches for everybody.”
The S.C. Department of Agriculture says overall, the peach crop was damaged because of the freeze in March, but the agency says it’s hard to give an exact statistic for the whole state because different regions had different impacts.
