First Peaches Ripen at Lane Southern Orchards | News

From the tree, to the factory, to your mouth, hand-picked peaches make quite a journey.

But thanks to the weather, Lane Southern Orchard says plenty of them are ripe and ready to make the trip.

Duke Lane, Jr. says, "We had a tremendous amount of cold weather and that was a good thing because the peaches getting what we call chill units which is required for them to bloom out at a normal time frame."

After the peaches are picked, they travel to the assembly line where they're rinsed and cooled to thirty-eight degrees.

A machine takes a snapshot of the peaches, counts them, and sorts them according to size.

"We probably do four or five bins per day so with that I'd have to say close to about two million peaches a day. " says control tower operator Grady Pouders.  

Mary Bond stopped in to sample the Georgia flavor.  We asked her what she thought.  "Melt in your mouth wonderful, sweet, probably could eat a whole bushel."

To measure the sweetness or brix, they use a refractometer. 
It uses light to gauge how much sugar is in the peach's juice.

Lane says a normal reading this time of year is between nine and ten, and the early crop of sweet treats scored a thirteen.

"Some of the sweetest early peaches we've ever had out here, and that's simply for the reason that we have not had any rain." says Lane.

He says Georgia peaches are ahead of the competition right now.  "We always try to get a jump start on our competition out west, and they're late this year. California won't start really picking a lot of fruit until Labor Day."

He also says the prices are good now, but when other states start producing peaches, the cost could go up.