Summer Peaches

Summer Peaches

Sunday in the Similkameen valley arrives cool and cloudy. Rain falls early, the first drops in weeks. It means the pickers can sleep late, past their normal five AM wake-up, maybe even have a rare day off. You cannot pick peaches in the rain.

Mid-August is midway through peach season here, in the southern slopes of BC, the fruit basket of western Canada. With midday readings of forty degree Celsius, trees laden with Red Haven peaches flex their branches in the westerly breeze. Above, the hillsides masquerading as mountains are upholstered in the rough and uneven tawny tufted elephant hide that houses rattlesnakes, scorpions and sage.

Every grower I speak with calls this valley Eden. Even Eden has snakes, but it seems incongruous to eat peaches in the desert, even an irrigated desert where the sibilance of water is the key to life.

This luscious fruit, tender, golden, running with amber juices, seems born to a more luxurious life than sere slopes and serpents. But peaches thrive in this narrow-gauge valley bisected by the southern track of Highway 3, the Crowsnest route that runs from Calgary to Vancouver, and the Similkameen River. The valley begins just west of Oliver and Osoyoos, where the Sonoran desert slips across the US-Canada border like a migrant picker in search of work. It runs west and vaguely north, narrowing to a gap at Hedley, site of the now-defunct Mascot Gold Mine whose heyday in the early 1900’s likely helped speed the valley’s settlement.

The Similkameen is slightly rough-edged, where established orchards and newly planted vineyards run uneasily adjacent to irrigated ranches and seedy trailers. But the narrow flat and its slopes claim six generations of growers, a steadfast culture of natural agriculture, and two dedicated-organics packing houses in the hamlet of Cawston. Combined, this has earned the region the sobriquet of Canada’s hotbed of organic growing. Fruit and ground crops harvested here are eaten in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, and south of the border.

My eyes well slow tears with the first peach I pluck and eat, standing in the orchards of Blush Lane Organics. There is nothing I can do but bend forward beside the grey-barked tree, tears and juice running together on my face, until both are finished. Orchard owner Rob Horricks waits patiently, then hands me another peach, and another, until my hands are full of fuzzy golden orbs tinged with garnet and ruby. Then we go walking, Horricks pointing out pheromone traps that confuse male moths with too much female scent.

This “sterile insect release” approach was devised by Summerland Research Station researchers, funded in part by Similkameen growers and Federal dollars. It is one biological program that has allowed organic growers to avoid pesticides and toxins, in a dry climate blessedly free of moulds and fungus. As longtime grower and shipper Elam Wills succinctly says, “You can win with insects, but you cannot hide from fungus spores.”

Peaches attract angels, babies and bumblebees dreaming of death by drowning in nectar. This most succulent of summer fruits is what gardeners envision when they contemplate adding a tree or two to their orchards. But peaches are fragile, trees and fruit alike, and have specific needs beyond the range of cold prairie winters. The peach belt of western Canada lies in the southern ends of the Okanagan, Similkameen, and Kootenay valleys, where frost damage to sensitive trees, and hail damage to equally sensitive fruit, is minimal.

When the time of the peach arrives, varieties flow into the markets like amber waves, one after another. First to ripen are the clingstone peaches, with their flesh firmly attached to the pit. Next are the semi-clings, like the early Paul Friday; when cut in half along its seam, it opens to reveal a split pit that only needs to be scooped out. In high summer,  free-stones peaches begin to arrive, with pits that slip easily from the flesh. Red Haven, Fair Haven and Glow Haven, all freestones, are the queens of the orchard, lush and ripe,  exotically sweet and rich. Peach skin is a fragile as a baby’s, and just as easily damaged. The flesh should be firm, just firm enough to yield to gentle pressure. A green tinge to the skin indicates under-ripe fruit, except in white-fleshed varieties. Store peaches in the fruit bowl on the counter until they ripen, then transfer them to the fridge to avoid fruitflies.

Canadians love fresh peaches. We eat 90% of our peaches fresh, out of hand. When we cook them, they deserve the simplest of treatments. Make a tart, a galette, a crisp or a cobbler. Simmer slices briefly in butter with a bit of honey or maple syrup and freshly grated nutmeg to fill crepes or top frozen yoghurt. Pickle peaches to serve with meats, or make spicy peach chutney with nuances of hot-and-sweet flavours to serve beside curries. Perfect peaches are worth rain, snake-filled hills, and tears.