Gillespie County grows peaches because it is cold enough, which is not a sentence anyone expects about Texas. A peach tree needs a tally of winter hours below 45 degrees before it will set fruit properly, and Texas A and M AgriLife puts the requirement for Hill Country orchards at roughly 830 of them. Varieties grown in South Texas get by on as few as 200. That regional spread is what lets the Hill Country grow mid and high chill varieties most of the state cannot, and German families who arrived from 1846 found the soil and the season suited to them long before anyone sold a crop. Commercial growing came slowly. The Eckhardts were selling peaches off a bob-tailed truck by 1936 and expanded their orchard to fifty acres from there, and twenty or so growers formed the Gillespie County Fruit Growers Co-op in 1946, with Lyndon Johnson among its members.
Growers switched from peanuts to peaches across the 1940s and 1950s, one of them recalling that his father tried peanuts and they did not make much. By 1982 Gillespie County led Texas in peach production at more than two million pounds. Vogel Orchard, planted by George and Nelda Vogel in 1953, opened its roadside stand on US 290 in the early 1970s.
The chill requirement is also the vulnerability. A late March freeze and hail on blooming trees wrecked the 2013 crop. In 2023 the trees banked about 530 chill hours against the 830 they wanted, leafed out slowly and shed their blooms, and AgriLife's fruit specialist Jim Kamas put the season at thirty percent of normal at best.
Getting there
30.2255, -98.6856
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