The closest weather station to Sumter County is Okahumpka Station located in Southwest Lake County. From there, I picked the 32-45 degree F model, because that's the temperature in which peaches accumulate chill. Then I choose my time range from Oct. 1, 2015 to Feb. 29, 2016. While this is pretty liberal on the Fall end (October). AgroClimate will then graph out a chill accumulation and projected chill accumulated. For this past year for the model and time frame, I choose southern Sumter/Lake counties received approximately 198 hours of chill. This is really low! Our historic average is 360 and last year we had 368 for the same time frame. Doing a little more math, 75% of our historic average comes out to 270. using this most people would have chosen a variety that had between 250 to 300 chill units required. Anything less than that would have required extensive frost/freeze protection due to the project bloom time of lower chill varieties.
Why did this discussion come about? Check out the peach variety infographic from http://www.growingproduce.com/fruits/stone-fruit/fleshing-out-the-state-of-the-florida-peach/1/. those varieties listed are just a small number of the total varieties available.
