The modern take on bottom soil as far as I can tell is that it often leads to excessive vigor. Comes down to the old balancing act of fruit production- too much vigor, and you get poorly colored and flavored fruit- too little and the trees are short-lived and production poor with small fruit. Guess you could call it the Goldylocks syndrome. In the west, you can get a handle on it just by controlling water, but after 20 years of growing fruit in the east I am still struggeling to come up with the right balance. I came to fruit trees through vegetables, so I went for too much vigor for the first 10 years. First, too much compost than too much mulch! Dwarfing rootstock certainly seems to simplify this dance with apples. M 26 is harder to excessively juice in my experience than more vigorous ones. Soil texture is as important as soil depth, of course. As I've said before on this forum, I actually prefer a sandy soil- you can usually add water in a home orchard if it's needed, but you can't easily reduce it.

I usually can peaches to save freezer space for beef and pork, which we raise ourselves, but I freeze a few for cobbler and pie as Iike the texture better, canned peaches seem softer when baked into a pie, etc. I blanch the peaches, peel them and put them into a solution of water with a couple of Vitamin C tablets broken open and dissolved in. Far cheaper than Fruit Fresh and it keeps the fruit from browning. Slice them, put them into a single layer on a sheet tray and freeze. If they stick just a few minutes will allow them to thaw just enough to release. Into a ziplock bag and into the freezer, and the individual slices let me take out just enough for a smoothie for the grandkids, a small batch of turnovers, some ice cream, topping for pancakes, whatever. I never use any sugar or syrup when freezing this way and even if I'm making scones or muffins the frozen slices still are easy enough to cut into smaller chunks. I've also done as Donna states and put all filling ingredients in a ziplock bag ready for use. The only thing I do differently is that I freeze the bags right in my pie plates, so they are the right shape to just plop into my pie crust for pie or into the pan to thaw and get ready for cobbler or crisp topping. When they are frozen they can be removed from the pie plate and stacked up for later use and the pie plate goes back into the cabinet for future use. Annie

Any thickener can become problematic if you use too much of it. That's the problem I have with flour. A little is good, but sometimes it's not enough to thicken very juicy fruit and if I put more in, the pie can get pasty. But the same could be said for cornstarch and tapioca. I've used all of them, and you can also use liquid pectin. The pectin in your fruits varies too, which will help a pie "set up" (or not). I use flour in most of my pies, and sometimes my pies get runny. I've experimented with tapioca with good results in a strawberry rhubarb pie, since strawberries are very runny and neither strawberries or rhubarb has much pectin. I only had pearl tapioca at the time which I put in the food processor to grind up to a mostly powder. I have since bought some instant which I am experimenting with. All thickeners can work or fail, IMHO, depends on a lot of variables. I've even read online in some blogs that some folks macerate the fuit in sugar, then pour off the liquid and thicken it by reducing it in a saucepan and then mixing it back in with the fruit before filling the pie. I doubt I would ever bother with that method! Whomever said "easy as pie" was being sarcastic! I find pies to take a lot of finessing, but even my most unsophisticated pies still taste pretty good. Mostly I just plop it in a bowl and call it "pandowdy" or "cobbler." I can well see why many cooks just said to heck with it and settled for those treats! As a couple of recent thread have pointed out, all fruits are not equal when it comes to juciness. We've gotten so far from agricultural diversity that we don't even realize that an apple isn't an apple isn't an apple. Some were bred for pies, others for cider, others for storing or drying, applesauce, or eating out of hand. Now you can usually only find a few varieties in most stores, and how many people dry fruit, make homeade pies, or mill cider anyway? Too bad for those of us that do, the good varieties could die out. Same with peaches, some are good for canning, some for fresh eating, and I imagine some for pies, although that I don't know for sure. And some years or on some farms the fruits are watery than others. I know I've found that with blueberries, which seem to be mostly tasteless around the East coast, but I'm a spoiled girl who grew up in the fruit belt of MI.

A restaurant here in California, Marie Calendars has a delicious fresh peach pie. They have killer pie crust, of course, bake it, and pile it high with fresh cut peaches tossed in some kind of peachy clear glaze. Then comes the whipped cream. It's delish!! We have a peach tree, but ours got brown rot this year. It's a cling peach, so not fun to slice, but what we tasted was good. I had the pie crusts all made, but we didn't get around to the spray program. We summer pruned, so hopefully, next year. I make my crusts with sourdough starter, and they are so tender and flaky, they melt in your mouth. Our apple tree produces so many apples, I have enough frozen pie filling to last till next harvest. Anna Apple ripens in June. Suzi