Peach Production in Florida - Great Article from GrowingProduce.com

Everyday I check out the most recent news on producing horticultural crops in Florida. More and more press is going to #FloridaPeaches. The number one key to success is choosing the right variety with about 75% of the chill hours your area receives in a normal year. Given our recent swings in temperatures; hot mild winter in 2015-2016 and cooler neutral in winter 2014-2015. You might be thinking, "What's normal?". Check out the AgroClimate link that is connected to the Florida Automated Weather Network or FAWN at http://fawn.ifas.ufl.edu/ under the Climate Tab. Chill Accumulation is the link you are looking for, from there you'll be directed to http://agroclimate.org/tools/Chill-Hours-Calculator/.

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.