Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, July 9, 1993                   TAG: 9307090267
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: B1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: LEIGH ALLEN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

FOR SOME, THIS WEATHER'S JUST PEACHY

Ideal conditions this year mean Virginia peach growers expect to have their best crop since 1989. And Al Nichols is ready to cash in.

Eyes cast slightly up, Nichols wandered through his "pick-your-own" Applebarn Peach Orchard in Troutville with the apprehensive grin of an expectant father. His trees were loaded.

"This should be a right decent crop," Nichols said, admiring the half-grown peaches in his seven-acre orchard. "We've had three pretty good years in a row now. That's rare for around here."

Growers expect to pluck 27 million pounds of peaches - at about 3 peaches to a pound, that's roughly 81 million pieces of the fuzzy fruit - from Virginia orchards this year.

That's up 2 million pounds from a good harvest last year and up 1 million from 1991, said Kevin Harding, a fruit forecaster for the Virginia Agriculture Statistics Service.

A cool March this year kept trees from budding until mid-April, Harding said. That saved them from the spring freezes that can wipe out a peach crop. Virginia orchards, considered to be on the northern edge of prime peach territory, are particularly vulnerable to fickle weather early in the growing season.

Nichols said peach trees require year-round spraying and pruning in order to make a good crop. But an entire season of work can be wiped out by an untimely weather front. "It only takes 10 minutes of cold weather to get you," Nichols said.

According to state agriculture records, peach acreage in Virginia dwindled from a high of about 12,000 acres in 1949 to only a few thousand acres now as growers decided the fruit is too risky.

Nichols, who runs the orchard with his wife, Vicky, knows the risks all too well. A new stand of 2-year-olds just beginning to bear their first fruit has replaced trees killed by a freeze in 1990. Nichols' total peach crop that frigid year? Zero.

"That's not one of those things we like to talk about," his wife said.

Some early varieties of Virginia peaches already are ripe and being picked. Nichols said his peaches are a "mid-summer variety" that will reach their peak in late July and early August. Other varieties will be available into September, he said.