James Creek Orchards
Sweet, Tree-Ripe, Hand-Picked Fruit
Apples
We planted about 50 vintage apple trees in the winter of 2008-09 and now have about seven acres of apples with over 65 varieties, mainly Southern heirloom and cider apple varieties, as well as some Gala, Pink Lady and GoldRush. Our Southern heirlooms, old favorites such as Grimes Golden, King David, Buckingham, Smokehouse, American Golden Russet and Stayman-Winesap are primarily multi-purpose apples with great flavor and wonderful to eat fresh or press for cider. So the prettier apples are sold for fresh eating, mostly at the Carrboro Farmers’ Market where we are entering our seventh season, and the others get crushed and pressed in small batches. We are so grateful to apple hero Lee Calhoun of Pittsboro who with his wife Edith researched and collected cuttings of apple trees, ultimately saving and documenting 400 apple varieties grown across the South from Colonial times to World War II. David Vernon of Century Farm Orchards carries on the nursery work that Lee started and has been our best source for old Southern apple trees. In December 2013, we bought a farm in Cameron to expand our apple acreage and set up commercial cider production. Except for the old Gala apple trees, the new apple plantings are young and frankly kind of scrawny at the moment, but this high-density orchard should be yielding apples for market and cider-making in a couple years.
Peaches
Our peaches begin ripening about Memorial Day and the season generally lasts all summer long until Labor Day. We grow about 24 different varieties and harvest each one for about 10-14 days before moving on to the next variety……Rich May, Candor, May Sweet, Derby, Caroking, Cary Mac, Saturn/donuts, Blazeprince, Winblo, Majestic, Sugar Giant, July Prince, Contender, White Lady, Carolina Gold, China Pearl, August Prince, Flame Prince, Big Red (please note some of these were planted before our time and are educated guesses).
Our peaches are sweet, juicy and tree-ripened. Most every peach we have is sold within 28 hours of harvest. So they are sweet and wonderful. Our customers call them “over-the-sink-peaches” and laugh about enjoying their juicy goodness. We are fanatical about ripeness and post-harvest handling so our peaches are at their best for you. Some commercial sprays are necessary to be sustainable in this part of the country, but we are very, very choosey about everything that is used in our orchards and minimize inputs. We have using cardboard and shade cloth as a weed barrier underneath growing trees and are shifting to pheromone-based insect control. Our new irrigation system has emitters that cast water in a 6-foot radius and is far more efficient than the old drip irrigation.
Blueberries
Our plot of rabbit-eye blueberries ripens from mid-June through the end of July. Our varieties include plantings of Premier, Climax and Brightwell, plus many older bushes where we are uncertain of the varieties but utterly convinced of their ability to bear big, sweet berries. We harvest all our blueberries by hand, sweeping through the plot every three-four days, allowing every berry to fully ripen before picking. The blueberries are not sprayed. We manage weeds with a combination of mulching, hand-pulling, vinegar and tolerance.
Pears
Sweet and juicy, most of our traditional “sugar pears” are from twenty-year-old trees that stand about 20 feet tall and eight feet wide. The pears generally bloom a few earlier weeks than the apples and judging from our crop load the past couple seasons, it seems that the wind machine we use for frost protection has really helped our pear crop. We also have a few Asian pear trees, Kieffer pears for canning, and a trial planting of English perry pears for cidermaking. Most varieties ripen beginning in mid August into September. The pears are grown using organic practices.
Muscadines
While we grow cultivated, fresh-eating varieties of scuppernongs and muscadines, one of our favorite parts of growing muscadines is hearing stories from customers about how they eat them and where they found them growing wild when they were children. Apples and peaches evoke wonderful memories, but muscadines memories are uniquely special. We grow bronze Granny Val and large black Nesbitt varieties which ripen in September. The muscadines are grown without herbicides or pesticides.
Persimmons
Our persimmon trees are the Asian varieties Tamopan and Fuyu. We like to wait until the Tamopan are completely soft and “over-ripe” before scooping out the flesh to eat or bake into a pudding, but the Fuyu is excellent when firm and can be sliced into salads or desserts.
