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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There seems to be some confusion about the exact identity of nectarines. Is they is or is they ain't a peach? Most cooking and gardening books agree with the Oxford English Dictionary, which defines them as "a variety of the common peach. " But Howard Hillman, in The Cook's Book, finds it most likely that "the peach and the nectarine did not spring one from the other but are both descendants of a common, now extinct, ancestor. " Botanically correct or not, the original name, "nectarine peach," is somewhat odd from the gastronomic point of view.

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.

Sometimes the stars align, and sometimes they collide. And sometimes they do both at once. We begin when Daughter Francesca and I get invited to speak at the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C., about our coming collection of the columns, which is titled Meet Me at Emotional Baggage Claim . Francesca thought of the title, which is very funny unless you happen to be the emotional baggage. That would be me. I don't mind being her emotional baggage. On the contrary, I like being a big heavy thing she totes around, like a guilt backpack.

Excerpts from Craig LaBan's online chat Tuesday: Good afternoon, my hungry friends, and welcome back to our weekly romp through the edible and drinkable wonders of Philly's food scene. Congrats to Christina Wilson, the ex-Mercato chef and South Philly resident who won Hell's Kitchen last night. I despise the show, but it sounds like she actually got a real job out of it (executive chef at Gordon Ramsay Steak at the Paris hotel in Las Vegas), so hats off to her for enduring the gauntlet of reality TV to get there.

Ethel L. Brooks had a strong urge to take Allen Iverson over her knee.   Ethel was a devoted 76ers fan, one of those enthusiasts who know all the players and statistics, and she didn't like the way the brilliant but controversial guard treated her team. Such inexcusable behavior, running off to the Denver Nuggets, the Detroit Pistons, and some team in Turkey! "I wish I was his grandmother," she once said. "I'd knock some sense into him. " Ethel met Iverson once, at a casino in Atlantic City, but that was before the controversy, and he couldn't have been nicer to her, her family said.

Here is an excerpt from Craig LaBan's online chat: Craig LaBan: I've been loving all summer produce that's around us this time of year, and took the family peach picking in Jersey, at Conte Farms in Tabernacle. I did my best to put a dent in the 22 pounds of ripe fruit we picked (in 10 minutes!) before the tractor returned. Reader: Where is the best place in Philadelphia to get artisan cheeses? My friends suggest I move to Bucks County, where I will be a short train ride away from Brooklyn where they have the best artisan cheeses.

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.