Peach

The first batch of winter fruit from Chile is offloaded yesterday at the Tioga Fruit Terminal on Delaware Avenue. The freighter Choapa, the first of about 120 ships scheduled to arrive this winter on the Delaware River, docked with 360,000 boxes of peaches, grapes, plums, nectarines and apricots. Delaware River ports receive about 70 percent of the winter fruit; the rest goes to Los Angeles.

Visitors can ride on a hay wagon or hop on a pony at Linvilla Orchards' annual Peach Festival Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. In the 100-year-old octagonal barn, visitors can sample peach pie, peach fudge, peach shortcake, peach butter and peach preserves. Hayrides will be $3 per person and will run from noon to 4 p.m. Pony rides also will be $3, and will run from noon to 3 p.m. There will be contests and games for the children, and folk music from noon to 3 p.m. for the whole family.

Snow had fallen by Halloween; in effect, spring arrived by Christmas, and the blossoms were popping by Easter. And despite the atmosphere's recent flirtations with quasi-normality, the seasonal fast-forwarding trend has continued briskly in the Philadelphia region's farms and fields, where veteran observers report that the annual bounty of summer fruits and vegetables is a full week to two weeks ahead of schedule. Even better, one weather service says the summer could pass without a heat wave.

Out in the orchards, Steven Sokoloff of Ardmore reached up and plucked a large, ripe peach from a tree. "I had a peach tree as a kid," said Sokoloff, 40, as he put the fruit into a half-full cardboard box. "I'm coming back here to remember what it was like. " Sokoloff was one of hundreds of peach lovers who gathered at Linvilla Orchards in Middletown on Sunday for the annual peach festival and to pick their own fruit. Visitors of all ages piled into wagons for a hayride out to the orchards, where the fruit was plentiful.

Peach pizza, peach pancakes, a Little Miss Peach contest and two peach runs are some of the features at the fourth annual Camden County Regional Peach Festival Saturday and next Sunday in Pennsauken. "Anything to do with peaches, we're going to do it," said Linda Butenis- Vorsa, festival treasurer. "Not a lot of people know New Jersey grows peaches," she said. In fact, New Jersey produced more peaches last year than Georgia, and is third in the nation in peach production. Camden County is the fourth largest peach producer in the state, with 2,500 of New Jersey's 14,000 peach-devoted acres, she said.

Anyone who joins one of those partnerships that invest in movies knows that there is a great deal of risk involved. For the hardy Irish souls who put up the money for Eat the Peach, there was also clear and present danger. The comedy, written by John Kelleher and Peter Ormrod and directed by the latter, was made on a set where a shoestring counted as a luxury. One way to save money was to round up visiting investors and invite them to play extras in their own movie. Since the enterprise that engages the film's two heroes is the building of a ramshackle wall-of-death in which they gun their motorcycles, the assignment turned out to be a little tougher than a normal day at the races.

Alfred S. Caltabiano Sr., 81, a Gloucester County peach grower who started farming during the Depression, died Friday at Cooper Hospital-University Medical Center in Camden. Born in the Catania province of Sicily, Mr. Caltabiano came to the United States with his family when he was just 3 years old; they settled in Philadelphia. As a young man, Mr. Caltabiano traveled from Philadelphia to South Jersey farms each summer to work cutting asparagus and picking tomatoes. In 1939 he purchased his 106-acre farm in Mullica Hill.

August is drawing to a close and, already, the temperatures have dipped into the 50s once or twice at night, with a forecast for more of the same. Twilight is arriving earlier now to erase the long summer evenings, minute by subtle minute. Shop windows are showing wool. A few red leaves have intruded among the summer foliage on suburban lawns. And today, weather permitting, comes another undeniable harbinger of autumn: From 9 a.m. until noon, Linvilla Orchards' hay wagon will trundle pickers out into the peach fields for the season's final pick-it-yourself day. Next crop: pumpkins.

Until two years ago, every peach that Santo Maccherone couldn't send to market cut into his profit margin. There was nothing wrong with the peaches - in fact, they were probably the best-tasting ones because they were perfectly ripe. But that also meant they couldn't be shipped without suffering bruises or turning overripe. "I was throwing out at least 10 percent, sometimes more, of the crop each year," said Maccherone, a third-generation farmer who owns Circle M Fruit Farms in Mullica Hill.

Township police and U.S. Secret Service agents discovered three explosive devices in a former peach-packing warehouse last night near the Echo Plaza shopping center off Hurffville-Cross Keys Road. No injuries were reported. Deputy Police Chief Jim Murphy said investigators went into the warehouse, which is across Fries Mill Road from Echo Plaza, with a search warrant for explosives at 7 p.m. Murphy said he did not immediately know the type of explosives found, except that they were "dangerous ones" and that other materials that might have been used to make bombs also were discovered.

Snow had fallen by Halloween; in effect, spring arrived by Christmas, and the blossoms were popping by Easter. And despite the atmosphere's recent flirtations with quasi-normality, the seasonal fast-forwarding trend has continued briskly in the Philadelphia region's farms and fields, where veteran observers report that the annual bounty of summer fruits and vegetables is a full week to two weeks ahead of schedule. Even better, one weather service says the summer could pass without a heat wave.

You would think that if you live alone, you get to be the boss. As in, you're not the boss of me. Because now that it's only me, I should be the boss of me. In fact, I'm self-employed, so I am, literally, my own boss. But that's just literally, or maybe for tax purposes, but not in real life. In real life, my dogs are the boss of me. And my cats are my slave masters. I realized this a moment ago, when I was working on my laptop, with two dogs sleeping on either side, Peach and Little Tony, each with its head on my lap. I like to work with the TV on, and some horrible show came on, but I couldn't reach the remote to change the channel without waking up Little Tony.

Labor Day weekend brings the end of summer, with cool September breezes a welcome relief from muggy, 100-degree days. Still, it's bittersweet to say goodbye to the season. But, as in autumn, when leaves turn most brilliant just before winter, summer offers a sweet finale - fuzzy, juicy peaches. Delicate and ephemeral, peaches are a perfect way to end summer. Their easily bruised flesh doesn't travel well, and their sticky sweetness quickly overripens to leave a soggy mess and a kitchen full of hovering fruit flies.

When Jerry Frecon became the agricultural agent for Gloucester County 30 years ago, he took a distinctive pleasure in riding the back roads of Deptford. "Summer nights, you couldn't miss the smell - pig farms, with the pigs who fed on waste and garbage," said Frecon with a laugh, his New Jersey Peach Promotion Council cap a bit askew. There are no pig farms in Deptford now, just big-box stores, said Frecon, who is spending his last year as Gloucester County's ag agent - the go-to guy for farmers and nursery owners with complaints, problems, and ideas.

Penn State football fans are hoping Deion Barnes does not have some kind of secret peach fetish. Penn State and Georgia . . . Those are the only two schools still in the running for the 6-5, 230-pound Barnes, a defensive megarecruit (end or outside linebacker) who last fall led Northeast High to its first Public League football championship since 1983. South Carolina, Pitt and Michigan also were part of Barnes' final five. SC was nixed a while ago. Barnes forgot about Pitt and Michigan after those schools recently fired their coaches.

I've always known what it's like to have a great mother, but I had no idea what it's like to be a great mother. Having one dog can't really approximate what it's like to be a mom. That takes at least three dogs. As you may know, my mother was recently traveling on tour with her latest book, and it was a grueling schedule: a different city every other day, high-energy signings, meetings with booksellers, and greasy airport food. She loves it, but it's a tough job. Still, it ain't nothin' compared with being a stay-at-home mom. I should know.

As far as the eye could see, the landscape was ablaze with frilly pink and salmon blossoms of peach trees, aligned in neat rows across Harrison Township in Gloucester County. The sight rivaled the cherry blossoms in Washington and turned the heads of motorists passing Zee Orchards, off Routes 322 and 55. For more than 50 years, Gloucester has been the No. 1 county for peach production in New Jersey, with 4,600 acres of orchards. Every April, the land draws admirers who follow a self-guided blossom tour developed by Jerry Frecon, agricultural agent for the Rutgers Cooperative Extension of Gloucester County.

The Christmas holidays, circa 1891, were coming, and that meant the football players and the rugby players and the other mashed-nose hellions attending the International YMCA Training School in Springfield, Mass., would be coming inside for their physical education classes, which in turn meant hide the good china and anything else breakable, and find something to keep them occupied. That charge fell to a future Presbyterian minister named James Naismith. The school's gym was not a great deal larger than a phone booth, so Naismith shrewdly deduced that whatever he came up with shouldn't permit the sort of kick-the-groin mayhem the footballers and ruggers gloried in. The ball, a soccer ball, he decreed, could only be passed.

A peach tree blooms in a parklike green space on 15th Street, south of Thompson. Just north of there, a construction boom has changed the look of nearly an entire block of rowhouses, anchored by a renovated apartment building. But this land in North Philadelphia, at 15th and Cabot streets, remains untouched. "I've had people come by and tell me, 'This peach tree has fed me on many days when I didn't have any food,' " said Vivian VanStory, founder and chief executive officer of the Community Land Trust Corp.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, get out your napkins. The Jersey peaches are ready, and they're plenty juicy. "These are dribble-down-your-face Jersey peaches," said Douglas H. Fisher, New Jersey secretary of agriculture, who stood sweating in the heat of an early August morn as the Collingswood Farmers' Market opened Jersey Peach Month. Next to Fisher glowed the New Jersey Peach Queen for 2009, Michelle Beebe, 17, of Glassboro, crowned at the Gloucester County 4-H fair in July.