There should not have been a Peach

As a representative for Growers Mineral Solutions, I have burned up the phone lines to Jim Halbeisen and others in the organization in order to learn what the “right” answers are to constant questions from current and potential customers. It seems like I am always on defense against what the “educated” people have to say rather than just letting the program speak for itself through the crop. It seems there are so many folks that want all questions answered at the kitchen table, like the establishment does, but want nothing more than bragging rights for highest yield at the coffee shop at the end of the season.

It is a breath of fresh air when those tables are turned around and the customer starts providing a list of things they have seen changing while using GMS. This is what happened with Jim Seiler of Lakeview Orchard, near Reo in southern Indiana.

Jim stopped by the GMS booth at the Louisville Farm Machinery Show in Feb. of 2019 and simply said, “who is your local guy to talk to about this stuff?” I took my new salesman, my son Tyler, to Reo so we could fill this guy in on what GMS could do for him. We told him he would have better flavor and longer shelf life for his peaches. Jim ordered some GMS to give it a try on parts of his peach orchard. As the 2019 harvest was kicking into gear, Jim began telling us a few improvements he had noticed. His peaches’ flavor was good, the trees had better holding ability (peaches don’t fall off when limbs shake while picking) and less spider mite pressure.

Throughout the winter Tyler and I kept talking to Jim about GMS being a program and not just a product to add to what is normally done. We emphasized how using nitrogen (N) can hurt flavor and diminish the health of the trees and encouraged him to add GMS any time the sprayer is being pulled through the orchard.

2020 began with GMS added to the early crop oil spray, at pink tip and full blossom and no N used. That’s when mother nature blew in a cold snap on the first week of April. Jim spent two nights watching thermometers scattered around his orchard. He was not very pleasant to talk to after this ordeal. “Hit hard” and “ugly” were some comments he had along with a few other choice words. “The majority of this orchard was at 24 degrees for over 12 hours and down in the valley was closer to 18 degrees, just sickening”.

A couple of days later Jim’s demeanor began to change as he was finding that the only trees that were completely froze out were in the lowest part of the valley. A few days more and his thoughts were “maybe the freeze did my thinning of fruit for me”. A little over a week and the report was that almost all of his peaches would need to be thinned like any other year. “Unbelievable”, “amazing”, and “ridiculous” were being added to his vocabulary. “Other orchards that recorded two to three degrees warmer than me and even had inversion fans running are wiped out.”

Lakeview Orchard ordered more GMS.

Jim has been in peaches all of his 60 years. He does not mince words about what works, what doesn’t and what he is seeing change with using GMS. When Tyler and I talked with him during the rest of the growing season, we asked a lot of dumb questions since we are not peach growers. We soon realized that he was the one filling us in on what Growers can do for peaches. I started taking notes and making recordings. Following are some quotes from Jim Seiler about Growers Mineral Solutions. Perhaps others can pick up a point or two about how Growers can help their own orchard or, at least,  provide those undecided folks a good swift kick in the pants to give it a try for the first time.

“I just didn’t think my tree health was where it should be. I liked what GMS had to say about health and quality. The fact that they are FDA inspected also helped me decide to give it a try.”

“Whether or not GMS helps prevent freeze damage of peaches is NOT up for debate. It has already been tested and proven. Case closed. I’m telling you right now, folks, there should not be a peach on this place, but I am thinning like crazy. I had made 5 foliar feeds at the time of the freeze but was at about half the rate Marty thought I should have been. Looking back, I wish I had been at the higher rate to see how those trees in the valley handled those coldest temps.”

“I had written off those 4 year old trees across the road since young trees will not take the cold as well as older trees, but when it came time to thin I thought Marty and Tyler were going to cry when they saw how many peaches we had to knock off to get proper thinning.”

“I still use old school powdered sulfur for fungus control. It just does a better job for me. The screen on the sprayer would plug up a few times each tank with undissolved sulfur until the GMS was added. I don’t know why, but it did not plug up anymore.”

“I don’t use surfactant with any of my sprays. Just add the Growers and it takes care of it.”

“I saw early on by the color and texture of the leaves and even the bark that we had good things going on”

“Early maturing peaches are cling and we call them junk peaches because they don’t have great flavor and all ripen at once so you get 2 or 3 heavy pickings that have to be sold right away or 50% get tossed out in 24 hours when they start to rot. We still have to raise them to draw customers since they are the first of the season. With GMS the color and flavor was unheard of while ripening was spread out to where we took 5 to 6 nice pickings and were able to keep them in storage for at least 10 days and still sell them as #1’s. We marketed 85 to 90% instead of throwing a large portion away. The seeds even came lose easier.”

“Seed splits are very common in these early peaches but nowhere near as many with Growers.”

“All the nitrogen we bought for the peaches is still in the shed.”

“In the past we checked for spider mites constantly. If you saw a couple you had to spray right away, or the population would explode overnight. I still check, but with GMS I don’t get as excited because the population explosion doesn’t happen like before. When Marty and Tyler wanted to see a spider mite, I took them to where I had seen a couple earlier but all I could find were dead mites. It hit me later that I had ran my GMS spray where the mites were dead. Later, it took a while to build up the courage, but I sprayed GMS by itself where I knew there were some spider mites and it smoked them - dead. I left that $500 per gallon miticide in the shed.”

“This summer we had some of the worst weather for peaches. Hot, humid and frequent rain makes me expect to lose a lot of peaches when they split the skin as the fruit swells on the inside. With GMS the splits rarely happened. I am amazed”

“Trees on either side of the coldest valley were partly frozen, leaving them with 30 – 40 fruit per tree instead of around 350 like we want. This variety got way over sized which did bring on splits in the hot rainy weather while they were still green. A split peach will begin to rot in a few days, but these stayed on the tree until ripe 3 to 4 weeks later. 3 to 4 WEEKS! They were harvested and sold out the front door with good color and flavor and the customers kept coming back for more.”

“A buddy of mine down the road uses my peach throwaways from one particular variety every year to make wine for his winery. We usually get enough for him in 1 or 2 days. This year it took 2 weeks to find enough and some of those I could have sold out the front door. He was impressed with the sugar content this year.”

“Never in my life have I seen the colors that I have this year. Only a little yellow with dark red and even purple skin – color sells! Color makes the first sale, and the flavor makes repeat sales after that. Even the interior of these peaches is darker and juicier – not even in the same category as before.”

“Aug 1, after 2 weeks of 90-degree temps and high humidity with rain, I expected to find half of the peaches with rain checks (discoloration that looks a little like a scab). Out of 200 boxes we only found 10 with checks and they were minor.”

“I always dread the hot humid weather. Peaches are green one day, ripe the next and falling on the ground the day after that. We even lose the staggered ripening of the different varieties. Everything gets ripe at the same time making it almost impossible to keep up with picking and getting to market before rot sets in. GMS holds the ripening on schedule and keeps the varieties spread out like they should be and provides much better holding ability in the cooler.”

“After all these years this !@^* Growers stuff is forcing me to rethink the way I pick and market peaches. Ha Ha. We used to have a massive picking day on Friday to fill the cooler for the weekend. Now, we spread that workload out over several days and fill the cooler gradually throughout the week with no concern about holding longer.”

“I hate apples. I ABSOLUTELY hate apples! I only have 4 acres of them and wish I didn’t have those. Now my son-in-law is talking me into adding more apples and juicing them up with GMS. Thanks a lot, Marty.”

“GMS has made these trees remind me of the way things were done years ago. I even made a paste out of fine lime with a little growers in it and smeared it up and down the trunk of young trees like old timers used to white-wash them. I left some without and I can tell the difference. It seems to have helped trees that had canker when they arrived from the greenhouse. I have even changed varieties of trees I am planting next year. I am bringing back southern varieties that we did away with years ago because we only got a crop from them 2 out of 5 years. Does that tell you anything about the confidence I have in this stuff?!”

“Things always happen in steps or stages. Step one has been color and taste of the fruit as well as health of the tree. Now I'm wondering, what’s the growth going to be like? What about the root base? What will water uptake be like. I look forward to seeing what these new trees do that are going to be on Growers and high calcium lime right from the beginning.”

Tyler, Jim’s son-in-law, didn't talk to us as much as Jim did. He said “I was busy working while you guys stood around talking”. He was rarely seen standing still so his point may be valid. When asked about his overall thoughts on GMS, he made one statement that really sunk in. “Growers took away a lot of stress. Not worrying about having to pick massive amounts of fruit before it drops and not worrying while picking how to get it sold before it rots since it can sit in the cooler for weeks and still be good to go.”