If it's me.... Assuming your Elberta is a real Elberta... which means August fruit most years... Belle of Ga - also a Late season peach... and Early Crawford is also late - Mid August (Though it's Earlier than 'Late Crawford..) So.. You already have a PILE of peaches coming off in August.... Pick Early/Mid season peaches... Winblo - about 2 weeks before Elberta. Delish! Red Haven - ripens mid June.. and an AWESOME performer Anyway - here's a good list from Clemson University... 2 different farms trying them out.. but you can see approximate ripening order and some discussion... Yours are pretty well all clustered within a 2 or 3 week ripening period... Note - Musser farm is typical acid, depleted 'Georgia Red Clay' soil, up by Greenville, SC... Cooley farm is more Yellow Sand/loam soil and it's farther downstate.... Thanks Here is a link that might be useful: Clemson Peach Report 2012

I ate so many perfect peaches this year and it didn't really matter too much the variety. Just if they are heavily thinned and was the peach picked from a well exposed part of the tree. To me, there isn't that wide a range of qualities between yellow peaches on a good year. I was surprised and pleased with the lemony flavor of Earnie's choice this year, something I didn't notice before so I wonder how it will taste next year and is this a common occurance. I have a Red Haven on my property that for some reason puts out a lot of perfect looking watery and bland fruit year after year but I even found a few perfect ones on it. I do like a tree with large sized peaches, deep orange flesh that bears over a long period, like 3 weeks, without the last ones mushing out. Jonboy provides these year after year for me. Earnie's choice seemed to be done in little more than a week. There are now some yellows coming out that are low-acid, so I guess they must be noticeably different but I like higher acid peaches so it's not likely a difference I will appreciate. Messina has great red and orange colored flesh and is a very highly flavored peach. I'm beginning to believe it is a standout in its season as there were very few duds. But this was only it's third year of fruiting so I want to see how it does when the tree is fully sized up. I ate a couple of Autumn Star this year that were promising- does have some acid to go with the sugar. It will have to be good to surpass Encore for a late though. Coralstar is a peach that seemed so wonderful when I picked the fruit from a small tree but now seems to be just another fine large fruiting variety without great distinction as picked off a full sized tree. Maybe that's what happened with TangO but I need a couple more seasons with that one. It is at least a very distinctive peach for its texture and even though I wasn't that crazy about it this year my customers go ga ga for it. Another one that seemed great from a small tree was Desiree- at least for such an early one. I will try to find room to put one where I can evaluate it as a mature tree. White peaches that I liked this year were Manon, which seems to get very high sugar and good size for such an early peach and Lady Nancy which got huge and is the best textured white I've every tasted- nice melting flesh. I loved having nectarines for most of peach season although most of the later varieties crack too much to be practical. Ambre was the exception but it's a young tree and didn't have a lot of fruit. I'm not even sure how much I like its flavor as it is a low acid type. Eastern Glo and Summer Beaut both seem almost as easy to grow as peaches and should be more widely utilized by people who want more snap than a peach is likely to provide. By the way, I think you can call the sports of Loring to be pretty much the same peach but ripening at different times. No important other difference between Jonboy and Loring that I can discern.

"I've never heard of anyone using layering for this method but you must have been working in a pretty big scale to get that much heat from the chips." I was somewhat limited by the equipment I was using. Last summer I rented a Dingo to move mulch and make more mounds. While they are handy to move mulch, they are pretty slow digging, so I really didn't use near enough top soil (because it was slow to dig). However, I had built mounds the same way (layered mulch mounds) the summer before and gotten by with it with no problems. I constructed them by starting with a big mound of mulch (wood chips) on the bottom and then a couple alternating layers of soil and mulch after that. My thought was the layers of mulch would be thin enough they wouldn't compost, but I got the mulch too thick. Before I started using mulch mounds, I made mounds with just plain dirt and have never had any problems with 100% dirt. I agree I don't think mulch on the bottom with a generous amount of topsoil on top would have caused problems, as long as the roots were insulated from the mulch.

Dear Mrs G, We suppose that some clarification is in order before these suburban legends ripen into received truths. Particularly to correct the order of causation. We received the Early Crawford in the early 1980s, if memory serves, from the former experiment station at Prosser WA, which is no longer. Our principal gnome started the scion exchanges of the CRFG organization in 1983/4, and Early Crawford was one of the original varieties he made available then and in subsequent years. It has disseminated (actually, disscionated) from there and has been propagated by many. Our gnome also was the person who gathered together from our orchard the propagating material for the heritage orchard planted at Emma Prusch Memorial Farm Park of the City of San Jose, which was intended to preserve the fruit varieties of the Santa Clara Valley. This was ca. 1996. A tree of Early Crawford was propagated, but was not planted at Prusch Park, instead ended up in the orchard at Filoli, a property of National Trust for Historic Preservation. This because City of San Jose reduced the space available for trees. So no Early Crawford could ever have come from Prusch Park. Our gnome has not been involved in the scion exchanges since 1999, and cannot answer for trueness to type of any Early Crawford except those issuing from The Arboreum Company or the USDA National Clonal Germplasm Repository (GRIN), which was propagated from ours. The Arboreum Company certainly does not gather propagating material for our use from the Prusch Park orchard and Crawford material at any scion exchange does not come from Prusch Park. We do know that scions at the various exchanges are handled very promiscuously and come from various sources, are spread out on tables and grabbed up again to be rebagged and sent on to other exchanges. Obviously we do not rely upon such sources. We received some 20 years ago material purporting to be Oldmixon Free and it was planted (on probation) at Prusch Park. Upon fruiting, we considered it more likely the 'Oldmixon Free Improved' found in Stark Bro's catalogs of the 1920s, for the reasons stated by Scott Smith. And so it was labelled in the Prusch orchard. From there it has travelled the route of scion exchanges and may have shed its qualifier "improved" from time to time. Our friend Charlotte Shelton has many times promised us a tree of Tom Burford's Oldmixon for comparison, but it hasn't happened yet. The gnomes at The Arboreum Company