Middle Georgia farmers welcome peach season. See where they come from

It’s been a busy spring at Lane Southern Orchards.

In Fort Valley, the 11,000 acre farm has spent the past several weeks pruning trees, training workers, and ordering supplies ahead of one of its most important harvests of the year — peaches.

Meanwhile, Dickey Farms in Musella has been in a similar sprint. Workers bagged the orchard’s first peaches of the season during the first week of May, and already the packing house and fruit pickers are running on a near-daily basis.

Although Georgia’s most famous fruit takes center stage during the summer, farms put months of labor into growing, packing, baking and canning peach and peach products in preparation for visitors flocking for fresh fruit. Middle Georgia farms are at the center of it all, boasting some of the biggest orchards in the state and selling peaches near and far.

A fruit months in the making

Tyler Wainwright, a farm manager at Lane Southern Orchards, said peaches in Georgia are typically harvested in the summer months, but for orchards peach season starts much earlier.

Peaches are a delicate fruit that require a certain balance of sunlight and cold in order to thrive. Workers begin examining trees in February and March — just before the trees blossom — to estimate that year’s peach crop based on the number of cold hours the trees see, Wainwright said.

Additionally, while peach-hungry customers may imagine tree branches heavy with peaches, Wainwright said workers prune fruit from trees throughout the spring, when ping-pong ball sized fruit appears along the branches. A branch carrying 20 peaches may be pruned down to less than 10.

“That allows the peaches to get bigger and get more sunlight and nutrients,” Wainwright said.

State Rep. Robert Dickey — who oversees Dickey Farms’ nearly 1,100 acres of orchards when he’s not busy inking legislation for the Georgia House of Representatives — said the first batches of fruit arrive in May.

Because peaches are at their best for just a few days, peach picking is still done by hand so workers can determine which fruits are ready to be harvested and which ones need a few more days on the tree.

An army of workers with baskets around their necks march into the orchards at dawn almost every day. Each tree is harvested three or four times a year and can yield 600 to 700 peaches, Dickey said.

Workers load peaches into a set of plastic carts pulled behind a small tractor that weaves through rows upon rows of shady peach groves. When workers finish picking around noon, the tractor drives the peaches to the packing house.

“It’s really hard work, they’ve got to know what to leave and what to pick,” Dickey said.

Both Dickey Farms and Lane Southern Orchards grow around 30 varieties of peaches. Different varieties are ready at a different point in the season, with each type having a window of just a few weeks for harvest. The result is a continuous parade of new peach varieties available each week at the orchards’ storefronts and shipped to grocery stores across the country.

A Peach State pilgrimage

Dickey Farms and Lane Southern Orchard both said they see thousands of visitors to the orchards and storefronts each summer as people near and far flock for peaches.

Boxes of fresh peaches are Lane Southern Orchards’ most popular merchandise, according to Todd Lumley, the orchard’s retail manager. But the on-site storefront also offers peach preserves, peach salsa, canned peaches, peach wine and peach pastries. Visitors can also enjoy a bowl of peach cobbler topped with peach ice cream at the storefront’s lunch counter.

“It’s a nice blend and lets us use all of our peaches,” Wainwright said.

Dickey Farms offers a similar range of products alongside their fresh peaches, and serves ice cream and baked goods on a spacious patio area with rocking chairs.

Both orchards also have a window where visitors can watch as fresh-picked peaches enter the packing house, run through a cold water bath to slow ripening, undergo a size-sorting process and are placed into boxes for sale.

Visitors were already trickling into the orchards’ storefronts Thursday and Friday as the first batches of peaches made it to the floor. Dickey said Dickey Farms typically sees most of its visitors in June and July, which is peak peach season.

“It really gets busy, especially on the weekends with people coming and eating ice cream or buying fresh peaches and produce,” Dickey said.

Similarly, Wainwright and Lumley said Lane Southern Orchards sees a steady increase of visitors as the summer goes on. Many aren’t from Georgia, and stop in to take home peaches to colder climates.

“We’re right off I-75, I think we get a lot of people coming to and from the beach and swinging in,” Wainwright said.

This story was originally published May 13, 2025 at 10:55 AM.