Hood County Texas Genealogical Society
PEACH
FORECAST BOUNTIFUL
AT TOLAR FARM
by Pete Kendall
Hood County
News - April 12, 2004
Oleo Farm in Tolar – “Just a Cheap Spread”
TOLAR – So far, so
good at picturesque Oleo Farm.
The peach trees have bloomed and the tiny globes sprouted. It remains to be
seen exactly how many of the juicy treats will survive to plucking season this
summer.
“God and nature
determine that,” Jim Smith said.
Smith knows
something about both.
Oleo co-proprietor along with wife Donna, Smith is a semi-retired hospital
chaplain who grew up on a Rio Grande Valley farm.
Tolar isn’t the
Valley, but there’s one similarity … dirt.
“With today’s fertilizers and mulches, you can do just about anything with
soil,” he said.
The Smiths purchased their Colony Road property in 1996 and planted their first
peach trees in 1997.
Of the present 145, approximately 80 in the main orchard are fruit-bearing. By
necessity, the trees are hardy. This is Texas.
“We had 120 trees
originally,” Smith said. “The drought and grasshoppers ate us up. We put net,
like from a formal dress, over all the trees for two seasons to keep them from
being totally destroyed.”
Oleo has been
blessed in recent years.
“We had a super peach crop last year while Weatherford and Fredericksburg were
having trouble with the weather,” Smith said. “God put a cloud over us one
Sunday morning when it was supposed to freeze.
“We’re loaded with
a lot of fruit again this year. We’ll know for sure what we have June 10th when
we bite into that first peach.”
At Oleo, that would
be the Sentinel. Unless you count the apricot, which isn’t a peach but is
almost as tasty in a fried pie.
“The season starts
with apricots from the end of May till June 10th,” Smith said. “Last year, we
sold fruit from all nine of the apricot trees. People picked them all in two
days.”
The Sentinel is
special because it’s the celebratory first peach.
“The first peaches
always taste best,” Smith said, chuckling.
Oleo’s peach
harvest is staggered intentionally. The longer they have peaches, the longer
they get to market them.
“We set out 10
trees of each variety of peach,” Smith said. “The Sentinels come off June 10th
and the Harvestors five to 10 days later.
“The Redglobes will
be ready around July 4th and the White Melba at about the same time. The
Denmans come off July 10th.
“The last peaches
will be the Bountys. We’ll have them into August. Of all the peaches, the
Bounty is the biggest. It will play out about August 10.”
Smith is partial to
the honey-dripping White Melba.
“They’re very sweet
and soft. They make the best cobbler and ice cream. You have to be careful you
don’t bruise them. Lots of times, they’re difficult to sell in the markets
because of that. People have to come pick them.
“Donna likes the
Harvester. She thinks it’s better to cook with and for jellies and preserves.”
Even when he
resided in the Valley, where everything grows except Igloos, Smith was
determined to cultivate peaches someday.
“At that time,
nobody had developed a peach that could really produce in the Valley,” he said.
“I said, ‘If I ever live north, I’m going to grow peaches.’
“We moved out of
the Valley in 1968. I went to school in Lubbock. From there, we went to New
Hampshire for five years and Illinois for three.
“We came to Fort
Worth in the summer of 1978. I started experimenting with peaches there.”
The name Oleo Farm
was a natural to a Valley farm boy.
“When I was a kid
on the farm, we always had plenty of butter,” Smith said. “Oleo became popular
because it was cheaper. We called it ‘just a cheap spread.’
“When we bought
this place, we decided to have a little fun with the name. We called it Oleo
because it’s just a cheap spread.”
Not.
It’s a little bit of agricultural paradise.
“The soil drains well,” Smith said. “We work compost, mulch, most organic
fertilizers, plus lava sand into the soil around the trees.
“And there’s
irrigation. It’s a drip system. I grew up with all this.”
Birds exterminate
much of the insect population.
“We have two purple
martin houses and two poles of gourds for the martins,” Smith said. “That helps
a bunch with insects.”
The Smiths will
pick fruit to sell to produce stands.
But they’d rather you load up the family, park and pick the peaches yourself.
“We encourage that,” Smith said. “Families have so much fun.”
2004
HOOD COUNTY TEXAS GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY