Peaches and Cream

It’s fresh peach season, a decidedly luxurious and even indolent time of the year. The season is short, just a couple of weeks for us, and this year I decided that meant we should eat peaches and cream every morning. Imagine! Starting every day with the cliche for the sweet and easy life!

Have you ever actually tasted peaches and cream? Just perfectly ripe peaches chopped into a bowl, with a few spoonfuls of heavy cream poured over. It’s one of those magical combinations that transcends its own simplicity into the realm of the divine. There are of course so many lovely things to do with peaches, but this is my favorite. 

Peaches and cream had existed only in myth for me until last year. Growing up in Alaska, ripe peaches were rare and expensive. If ever you got hold of one, you wouldn’t dream of doing anything but just eating it whole, juice dripping down your chin. After moving to Eugene, I was disappointed to find that locally grown peaches were still expensive, and consequently rare in our household. It wasn’t until our own tree began to produce last year that we finally had an abundance of peaches, and began to get creative with them. 

That was also when I discovered the hidden meaning in the phrase peaches and cream. 

Maybe other climates are different, but here growing peaches is a labor of love. There are a host of diseases that can weaken and kill the trees, and our rainy springs are just right for their proliferation. The clayey, sodden winter soil in this valley doubles the challenge. When I started gardening here, I was determined to grow a peach tree (and a cherry tree) as a consolation for having to leave my beloved Alaska. Most people I talked to about it tsk-ed and shook their heads. But my good friend, who lives right around the corner, had a peach tree so I knew it must be possible. 

I started by having an enormous load of topsoil dumped on the front lawn. I sculpted it into a triangular bed, 15’ on each side, mounded up 2’ deep in the middle, edged (quite attractively if I do say so myself) with a load of old Mediterranean-style ceramic roofing tile I got off craigslist. I planted a disease resistant peach tree in the middle, and 2 dwarf cherries on either end. I read up on best practices for disease prevention in our wet spring climate, and pruned only during the summer’s dry season, despite the inherent difficulties. I surrounded the trees with nitrogen fixers and dynamic accumulator plants to enrich the soil long term. I installed soaker hoses for reliable irrigation and mulched deeply. 

The peach tree grows like a weed, but definitely succumbs to fire blight every spring, and some kind of bacterial ooze from pruning cuts. I don’t know how long it will fruit for, but likely not more than 10 years, possibly only 5. I have invested hundreds of dollars and hundreds of hours of sweat and tears into this tree. 

So when I sit down to a bowl of peaches and cream, it is not quite the lazy, indolent, reclining-goddess-being-fed-grapes experience that I had previously associated with the phrase. Rather it is the exquisite and luxurious fruit of my very real and long labor. And isn’t that better, really? To put a name to that sweet, perfect moment of goodness that comes in the midst of seemingly endless work? 

Life is hard, make sure you take time to enjoy the peaches and cream.