good eats

for the next couple of weeks, if you are not eating strawberries every day, you should be---actual real strawberries, not those pale woody things you get out of season----these are from florida, the peaches are from georgia and are great----the late freeze trashed 60% of the crop but what's left, everyone agrees, are mighty tasty----

Franciscan monks introduced peaches to St. Simons and Cumberland islands along Georgia's coast in 1571. By the mid-1700s peaches and plums were cultivated by the Cherokee Indians. Before the Civil War increasing numbers of home orchards also were planted. Raphael Moses, a planter and Confederate officer from Columbus, was among the first to market peaches within Georgia in 1851 and is credited with being the first to ship and sell peaches successfully outside of the South. His method of shipping peaches in champagne baskets, rather than in pulverized charcoal, helped to preserve the flavor of the fruit and contributed to his success. Considerable expansion of peach acreage occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, resulting in an all-time high production of almost 8 million bushels by 1928. Since then production has decreased to about 2.6 million bushels annually.