

But what the Yonces and thousands of other peach growers still don't know is this: How does a peach know when the cold winter weather is over and it is time to grow?


"It's an interesting phenomenon," Clemson plant biologist Doug Bielenberg said. "These plants count the cold hours and days. If it gets warm for a bit, they stop, and then they pick up counting where they left off."





"The weather controls our destiny, basically," said Yonce, who has been growing peaches for four decades. The family business is J.W. Yonce & Sons farm, founded by his grandfather in 1932 in Edgefield County.


The fruit was perfect for the area. Winter nights are cold enough for the chemical reactions that make peaches sweet, but not cold enough to kill the fruit as it grows. Peaches later need warm to hot weather for the fruit to mature. That's why the Georgia joins California and South Carolina as the nation's leading peach-producing states.

Research from Clemson and the University of Georgia has helped up farmers considerably over the years. One of the Yonce farm's best-sellers is a peach, developed through years of breeding, that doesn't need as many chill hours so it ripens in May, but has the color, texture and sweetness of peaches that used to not hit the market until July.



Yonce takes his knife and cuts open a bloom. The tiny fleck inside is black. That flower would yield no peach, but Yonce wouldn't have known until after the pruning.

"Growing peaches is like legalized gambling," he said.

And that's something that science will likely never be able to change.


Follow Collins at