In an already trying year, Colorado peach farmers watched this summer as crop yields swung wildly between 0 and 100%. For consumers around the state, that meant less of a precious summer commodity — the Palisade peach — but more fruits filling in from the state’s other peach-growing parts. You can still find Palisade peaches, too, if you know where to look.
High’s fellow Palisade farmer Charlie Talbott says he remembers “pretty catastrophic crop loss” before this season, during four summers in the decade between 1989-99. After a two-decade run of successful harvests, he estimates the Palisade farms that did manage to survive this season came out with as little as 10% of their normal yield.
Talbott said his harvest suffered a 85-90% loss. “It was just too cold for too long” that April night. Every year around the same time he prepares to watch the weather forecast like a hawk.
But nature in this part of Colorado is usually on the peaches’ side. In the Grand Valley, an adiabatic wind known locally as the “million dollar breeze” compresses and warms as it comes off the mountain, usually working to protect even tender buds from an early spring frost. According to Talbott, what happened and what survived this year “didn’t follow any of the rules.”
Denverpost.com reports how around 10 peach varieties made it through, just depending on their frost-hardiness and exact location in the valley, he explained.
