14 THE AMERICAN PEACH ORCHARD 



dead at the core, and the trees will soon break down 

 under loads of fruit or stress of wind. This ques- 

 tion of the recovery of frozen trees is treated fur- 

 ther in the chapter on Pruning, page ii6. 



The northern limit of peach culture has been de- 

 fined as the line of twenty degrees below zero. 

 As a matter of fact, the peach is grown in home 

 gardens in an amateur way as far north as those 

 regions where twenty-five degrees below zero is an 

 experience of every few years, but commercial 

 orchards are hardly a safe proposition where even 

 twenty degrees below zero may be expected every 

 winter. 



There is also a southern limit to peach growing, 

 and if this limit is not so precise, it is none the less 

 positive. The southernmost areas in the United 

 States, for example, are outside the peach belt. This 

 fruit is practically unknown along the Gulf of Mex- 

 ico, and in Florida can be grown only on the highest 

 lands in the most northern counties. Peaches of 

 the Honey type, and especially of the Peen-to group 

 (see page i88), may be grown much farther south 

 than the common sorts ; but as these are not market 

 varieties and never likely to become such, we may 

 understand that the southern bound of the peach 

 section runs approximately along the northern line 

 of Florida, across the southern counties of Alabama 

 and Mississippi, crosses Louisiana somewhere 

 amidstate and sets off a zone of 50 to 100 miles wide 

 all along the Texas coast. In Arizona, New Mexico, 

 and California the limits of peach culture are fixed 

 by a multitude of local conditions so variable and so 

 complex that they cannot be safely stated in general 

 terms. 



The commercial grower of peaches, however, is 

 not so much interested in the extreme limits of cul" 



