EASTON — Irv Silverman was watching and worrying that Saturday night earlier this month when the temperatures fell below zero. While most of us wondered whether we could venture out, Silverman thought about his 8 acres of peaches, 15 varieties on a couple of thousand trees.
Two years ago, he lost the entire crop when the mercury fell to 10 degrees below zero at Silverman’s Farm on the weekend of Feb. 13-14. Connecticut saw almost no native peaches that season and other “stone fruits” — plums and nectarines — sustained heavy damage.
“We called it the Valentine’s Day massacre,” said Silverman, 75, whose father started the farm in the 1920s.
Looking at Silverman’s Round Hill, dappled with wet snow, a ring of short peach trees circling above the farm store, we still can’t tell much about this year’s peach crop. The good news: Calamitous conditions of the winter of 2015-16 haven’t hit this year, Silverman and others in the Connecticut fruit business said.
“Two years ago what happened was in December, it wasn’t really cold — in fact, it was mild,” Silverman said. “The peach buds didn’t get hardened up good.”
Then in February, the near-record lows hit all the harder.
This year, Silverman said, “I think they’re going to be fine at this point. ... But you can never tell until about April when the buds swell and then you can cut them open to see if there’s green tissue in them.”
In the spring, farmers need to worry about a late frost taking out flowers, and thus the peach fruits that are among the most temperamental of crops.
Even a complete crop breakdown like peaches in 2016 might not have a big effect on the state’s economy, but it matters to our sense of well-being because native peaches help define who we are. An overstatement? Personally, I’m such a peach fanatic — consuming about 18 a week in the short, late-summer season — that I drove to southern New Jersey for my fix two years ago.
No offense to Jersey, but it wasn’t the same.
“Native peaches are extremely popular. It’s a short window, but when they’re available, we sell tons,” said Scott Varanko, produce buyer for Stew Leonard’s in Norwalk. When the crop doesn’t come in, he said, “It’s something that hits real heavy. To lose that revenue does hurt quite a bit,” especially in August, when traffic is a bit slower anyway.
Across Connecticut, the U.S. Department of Agriculture counted 493 acres of peaches in Connecticut on 196 farms in 2012, up from 142 farms in 2007.
March Farm in Bethlehem is among the peach growers, where Ben March was also worried about the arctic snap. “A late frost when the trees are in bloom will be our biggest concern,” he said in an email.
The state Department of Agriculture documented some of the losses in 2016, including Woodland Farm in the hills of Glastonbury, the supplier for my addiction, where the Valentine’s Day mercury hit 12 below zero.
That’s why fruit growers in Connecticut raise several crops. Silverman’s has apples on most of its 50 acres, and also grows raspberries, blueberries and some vegetables, Silverman said.
And the farm is big into agri-tourism, with a petting farm of about 100 animals, among them llamas, buffalo, long-horn cattle, sheep, goats and deer. It’s a pick-your-own operation with a store on the farm, and train and tractor rides — all of which spreads out the revenue. “The old farm expression, we don’t put all our eggs in one basket,” he said.
Silverman, well suited for the tourism attractions as a self-described “people person,” won’t say the percent of revenue he pulls in from peaches. And he said he can’t estimate the cost of maintaining the trees because he doesn’t calculate the numbers separately. It’s pruning season now for all the trees, and cold weather is actually helpful — it keeps the sap flow to a minimum.
Silverman was the youngest of eight children Benjamin and Rose Silverman raised on the farm, and he’s the one who stayed, after studying business at the University of Bridgeport. “I guess I just fell in love with it, you know.”
He and his wife, Nancy, have three grown daughters — all gone from the farm — but he’s not retiring anytime soon. He has not participated in any of the state’s development rights buyout programs, and he relies on diversity, not insurance, to spread the risk.
So in short, Irv Silverman is doing more for the Connecticut economy than the total of his revenue dollars and payroll payments, and without taxpayer support. We all know the family farms dotting the landscape add value to the region.
As for those peaches, we’re all just hoping we don’t see that 10-below threshold, then we’ll hope for no late frost. “This year we had a cold December, which was good for the peaches,” Silverman said.
“Any farmer that’s growing fruit trees is rolling the dice,” said Varanko, at Stew Leonard’s, “and God bless them because Connecticut is tough.”
dhaar@hearstmediact.com