Marlene Russell has come to Fredericksburg to buy peaches since she was a little girl. These days, she likes to stock up each summer so she can eat some, freeze some, and make cobblers throughout the year.
"If it's a big crop, sometimes I make three or four trips down here," said Russell, who'd driven 100 miles from her home in Fort McKavett.
But the 2026 crop is not big. In fact, it's smaller than average for the third straight year due to a warm winter.
Russell bought what peaches she could from the Eckhardt Orchards farm stand in Fredericksburg, a small open-air market with tables full of local watermelons, squash, jalapeños and tomatoes — plus products like jams and pies. But the peaches are the big draw.
The area around Fredericksburg is famous for its peaches, which start to become available around mid-May.
"When peaches makes a wonderful crop, we're just so grateful because so many things have to come together to make a good peach crop," said Dianne Eckhardt, part of the family who owns Eckhardt Orchards.
Dianne is part of the third generation of Eckhardts to raise peaches in the Hill Country. In a kitchen that smells like coleslaw and cobbler attached to the farm stand, she explained how winter temperatures affected this year's harvest.
"The piece that we were lacking this year to have a full crop was the cold hours, the chill hours. We were marginal on them," she said.
After the first frost of winter, peach growers start counting chill hours, generally defined as time between 45 and 32 degrees Fahrenheit. Different varieties of peaches require different amounts of chill time — anywhere from 200 to 1,000 hours. In the Hill Country, Eckhardt said her peaches normally chill between 650 and 800 hours during the winter.
"Particularly January and February is when we get the majority of our colds. We want those nice cloudy January and February days," she said.
Too few chill hours in the winter means the tree won't bear much fruit in the spring. That's been a consistent problem, according to Larry Stein, a professor and horticulturalist for the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service who's been studying Texas peaches for 40 years.
"That's been the big struggle the past three years is, we just haven't had the cold weather," Stein said.
Year after year of low chill hours can stress trees long-term, Stein said. It can impact fruit quality as well as quantity.
"Low chill peaches are elongated, and they don't necessarily develop full quality like a typical peach would," said Stein.
The Hill Country became a peach destination because of its suitable soil and climate. The winters were cold enough without freezing too frequently.
A layer of clay under sandy loam helped carry the trees through drought. Earlier growers could rely solely on rain to water their trees. But Eckhardt Orchards now irrigates some of their crops to supplement rainfall.
Behind the stand in a small orchard, Dianne pointed out trees with skimpy branches.
"This is a variety that did not set very well this year. This is Dixieland. Not a whole lot of fruit on these trees," she said.
Other varieties, like Harvester, did better. Availability will vary as different varieties ripen throughout the summer. Last week, an eighth of a bushel — about six pounds — of Crimson Lady peaches was available for $29.
Eckhardt plans to plant some new crops — including pumpkins, okra and blackberries — for the fall in order to make up for the small peach harvest.
Although peach growers like Eckhardt may face challenges that their predecessors didn't, she says she's grateful for the opportunity to grow a crop each year, even when the weather doesn't cooperate.
"For my generation, I was gifted with it; I didn't have to buy this land. And it's a gift that it grows wonderful things, so that, you can't ignore that," she said. "You kinda feel like you gotta do what the land does best, you know?"
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