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more photosPeaches ripen in the sun at Kimberly Orchards in Eastern Oregon. The orchard, on the banks of the North Fork of the John Day River, has been growing a variety of fruit since the 1930s. U-pick peaches and pears are available through mid-September.
Photos by Julie Johnson / The Bulletin
JUST PEACHY
It's easy to savor summer when the sun is hot, the trees shady and the fruit is ...
By Julie Johnson / The Bulletin
Published: September 03. 2009 4:00AM PSTSummer is fleeting. It seems as if it's just days between the first complaint about 100-degree weather and the autumnal turning of the clock, when leaves begin to yellow and a chill creeps into the evening. Before we know it, summer has vanished.
Which is why sometimes, you have to forget about all the unfolded laundry and the litter of Hot Wheels on the family room floor and embrace your little slice of summer while you can. For my family, that means picking peaches.
Because here's a little-known fact: Eastern Oregon is home to some of the state's best fruit. At an elevation of just 1,800 feet, the valley of the North Fork of the John Day River near the tiny hamlet of Kimberly provides the perfect combination of sun, rain and temperature to ripen fruit — particularly stone fruit such as peaches, apricots and nectarines — to a perfect state of sweetness.
For our family, a trip to Kimberly is an annual event that results in the cupboards overflowing with canned peach slices, the freezer full of peach pie filling and mounds of dried peaches to tide us through the winter.
The drive to Kimberly is a pleasant enough couple of hours, winding through the High Desert forest, painted hills and small river valleys of Eastern Oregon. After the well-marked turnoff from U.S. Highway 26 onto state Highway 19, look for the Sheep Rock Unit of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument.
This is a great stopping point that includes a small but informative fossil museum, spectacular views of the geology that gives the colorful hills their name and a rest area small children (and especially their parents) will appreciate.
It's only a dozen or so miles from the fossil museum to Kimberly Orchards, our destination. Situated on the North Fork of the John Day, Kimberly Orchards has been growing fruit in this valley since Orin Kimberly established the first commercial orchard in the area in the 1930s.
His main crop was peaches, and it continues to be so today, but the orchards also grow apricots, pears, nectarines, apples and plums, as well as some vegetables from the proprietors' leafy, beautiful garden. Most of those items are available for purchase at the farm stand on the property, but on this day, we were there to pick our own.
U-pick fruit is a good way to stock up, but only makes sense if you want a lot of fruit. And picking a lot of fruit only makes sense if you have something to do with it before it goes bad. So before you pick, say, more than 100 pounds of tree-ripe fruit, have a plan in place for sharing, canning, freezing or otherwise disposing of your bounty.
Once we arrived at Kimberly Orchards, the fun began. We grabbed a couple of buckets from a stack and at the farmer's direction, headed off to the freestone peach orchard (freestones are better than cling peaches for preserving, because their pits pop right out when the fruit is ripe). Our kids — Harry, 7, and Jack, 4 — were delighted to grab low-hanging fruit to fill their buckets while my husband, Jason, and I climbed the three-legged orchard ladders for the more abundant (and riper) fruit on the higher branches. From tree to bucket, bucket to box, box to car, we amassed many, many pounds of peaches that day. A few never made it even as far as the bucket, and if you've ever eaten a just-picked, tree-ripe peach, warm from the sun and perfect, you'll know why.
With an occasional rest in the shade of the neat rows of trees and a post-picking douse in the nearby river, we kept cool. We hauled our peaches back to the farmstand for weighing, then loaded them back in the car after we paid.
We stopped in the shade outside the general store in Kimberly (it was closed that day because of a funeral in the community), and ate some sandwiches we'd brought in a cooler. And maybe just one more peach, too.
Then it was a lovely drive home, surrounded by the fragrance of the fruit that sat in bins in the back of the car. It was an aroma we would grow accustomed to over the next week, as we worked hard to preserve the fruit.
But every moment of labor will pay off in January, when I reach for the canned peaches and it's like opening a jar of summer.
Julie Johnson can be reached at 541-383-0308 or at jjohnson@bendbulletin.com.
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