On a recent hot, bright Friday afternoon, Bridget Stunz unloaded jams, peaches, potatoes and other produce onto the checkout counter at the Peach Creek Country Market about an hour southwest of Houston.
"My husband ate all the peaches," she told the cashier. "I had to come back."
"Oh, he's in trouble, isn't he?" the cashier joked.
Stunz is a regular at the Wharton County fruit stand, which is located about 30 minutes from where she lives.
"I was here last week and I'm here again," she toldHouston Public Media."Whenever they got peaches or, you know, they're getting the cantaloupes in and the watermelon, I'll come."
Many of those peaches, however, may not be from Texas this year.
Summertime is usually peach season in Texas, but it's been a tough year for the state's farmers. An uncharacteristically warm winter, paired with a late freeze, wiped out much of the crop.
"What we've been doing this year is we've been carrying a lot of South Carolina peaches," said Jeff Pavlock, the owner of the Peach Creek Country Market. "The Texas peach crop was wiped out."
Pavlock said it's always a bit of a challenge to grow peaches in Texas. The fruit trees need "chill hours" – a certain number of hours where winter temperatures stay below 45 degrees Fahrenheit.
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This year, he said, peach trees didn't get enough chill hours and a late spring freeze also wiped out much of the harvest. That freeze was followed by heavy rains.
"It's like one week you'll get a peach in that'll knock your lights out and then the next week, you've got to deal with the brown rot," he said. "And that's from all the rain."
Texas weather can be unpredictable, said Tim Hartmann, an assistant professor and extension specialist at Texas A&M.
"There is no such thing as a ‘normal' year," he said.
Hartmann said a lack of sufficient chill hours is becoming an increasingly common problem for Texas farmers.
That's because they need chill hours to produce healthy – and sweet – fruit. Hartmann compared a lack of chill hours to a lack of sleep.
"You're going to be more likely to snooze through your alarm clock, right? And then you're not going to be very productive that day," he said. "That's the same thing these plants are doing."
It's hard to say exactly how many peaches Texas typically produces. The Texas Department of Agriculture doesn't track that number and Texas isn't one of the seven states that participate in the U.S. Department of Agriculture's peach estimating program. However, Hartmann predicts that this year's peach crop will be less than half of last year's harvest.
Jim Pokluda owns a boutique farm north of Houston, where he grows a variety of fruits and vegetables.
Pokluda's peach trees are relatively young, so he said they’re not in their most productive years yet. Still, before this year's inconsistent weather, Pokluda was expecting to harvest about 5,000 pounds of peaches this year.
"This year I literally got zero," he said. "Every single fruit on those 310 trees aborted or was frozen."
He said the plants may have struggled to produce fruit, in part, because they're young. But he also attributes the poor harvest to this year's inconsistent weather.
"You can accumulate chill hours, but if it gets really, really warm, then you can negate those chill hours, and so take them away," Pokluda said. "And then you can gain them again, but now you’ve confused the plant. And then if all of a sudden you throw in a freeze, then you’ll just kill everything."
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Back at the Peach Creek Country Market, a fan roared near the produce to keep shoppers cool. Outside, a worker used a forklift to load pallets into a trailer that would deliver the fruit stand's produce across the region.
Pavlock, the store's owner, said the South Carolina peaches he's bought this year have been good, but this year just isn't the same.
"I ain't gonna sit back and tell you, I (don't) miss my juicy old Texas peach," he said.
For now, Pavlock said, farmers markets are doing the best they can.
"We will say our prayers for a better season next year," he said. "Because I know the good Lord will take care of us."
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