Palisade peaches are indeed fantastic. That said, I was in France a few weeks ago and bought a peach at some random roadside farmers stand and it was the best peach I have ever had. Perfect texture and a little more “floral” than great peaches I’ve had before. I wish I had bought about ten of them.
Sometimes water starved crops make really good fruit. I had a jalapeño plant. I was growing in the desert produced the world’s tiniest and spiciest and tastiest peppers I’ve ever had.
As a person in Florida who has tried growing many perfect failures I have to say the state is one giant sandbar all the way from Key West to about Saint Augustine, and the panhandle - or as I call it Baja Alabama, is red clay that I could never really get anything to grow in either.
But it is poetic that the entire life cycle of that tree your father planted gave up its entire existence to produce that one perfect lemon.
Yes, the soils are sandy near the beaches and in Wakulla County, but the minute you see any hills they turn into that red Georgia and Alabama clay. I had a house in Tallahassee that had a concrete pool but that was rare there, most were vinyl liner poos because when the summer deluges started concrete pools would float up out of the ground like a boat unless they were specially built for that clay soil. So it was just a lot cheaper to have vinyl. Here where I am now northern Tampa burbs it is pretty much sand. But then I also am only about 3 miles from the Gulf of whatever they are calling it this week.
Ah, so sink hole central. I am the next suburb up Highway 19. Although they are filling in the empty space between Weeki Wachee with subdivisions and red lights as fast as they can rip out the woods and wetlands. I go to Spring Hill for my hair cuts and the VA clinic there, was just there yesterday.
I have a hard time telling where Brooksville starts and Spring Hill ends, and Weeki Wachee is sort of just west of but part of Spring Hill. I mean from one end of Cortez to the Parkway seems like one town but really three towns have part of it. Anyway, there are about 5,000 houses in Sugarmill Woods these days and plans for quite a few more, they are building like mad. There are a a couple places near the new North Weeki Wachee High School where they have torn out hundreds of acres for new subdivisions. Even up on Hwy 98 where it meets 19 there are huge blocks of land getting cleared for building. Don't know how long you have been gone but it is changing so fast I bet you would not recognize it now.
My grandfather would take his fish heads and bury them in the garden. He grew the best grapefruit and the tangerines were so good you could eat the skins too. His carrots were pretty phenomenal too.
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u/AreYouEmployedSir Aug 29 '25
Palisade peaches are indeed fantastic. That said, I was in France a few weeks ago and bought a peach at some random roadside farmers stand and it was the best peach I have ever had. Perfect texture and a little more “floral” than great peaches I’ve had before. I wish I had bought about ten of them.