Peaches in Chilton County should be available toward the end of May.

“We are looking pretty good right now,” Chilton Research and Extension Center Director Jim Pitts said.

Pitts said the peach crops logged roughly 1,200 chill hours for the season, which bodes well for the upcoming crop.

Chill hours are counted by the Extension, which measures the amount of hours peach trees spend under 45 degrees for one complete hour, or a chill hour.

Pitts said the chill hours are necessary in order to produce a sufficient crop.

“We are doing really good usually if we can get over 1,000 chill hours,” Pitts said. “If we get over that amount, we feel pretty good about the crops.”

Peach trees must be exposed to cold weather in order to keep buds from opening too early, which prevents the buds from being damaged by being exposed to a potential late freeze.

“All of the information we have is that a cool spring often lends to the help of the size of the peach,” Pitts said. “We definitely had a cooler spring, and if we can keep a cool pattern going, that should translate into some nice-sized fruit.”

Pitts anticipates the peach season to get underway a tad bit later than usual with peaches expected around the third week of May.

“It is a little bit later than previous years,” Pitts said. “I don’t know if we will be picking any peaches by mid-May. We had one year where we were picking peaches the last week of April, and we just aren’t going to have that this year.”

Pitts said peach growers have had an issue this season with a wet and cloudy blooming period, which has caused some pollination problems for the peach crops.

“Right now we are seeing some differences in the size of the peaches, and there is a little bit of concern that the peaches might be smaller,” Pitts said. “Everyone is thinning, and thinning doesn’t seem to be that bad of a job. Some of these varieties have already shed so it makes thinning relatively easy. It won’t be too much longer until we have some peaches available.”