Laura Gabriel shares about what she learned from growing a peach tree with her family.
When my husband and I bought our first home in 2016, a tiny 900-square-foot Devita bungalow in downtown Napa, there was a mature peach tree in the backyard. It was late summer and the fruit had already been picked, but just knowing it was there felt like kismet. Peaches have always been my favorite fruit. The next season, the tree exploded with hundreds of peaches. We were thrilled.
We’re farmers! What are we going to do with all this fruit? What we didn’t know was that too much fruit means none of it ripens well. Next season, we told ourselves, we’ll do better. In 2018, we pruned the tree back hard. It hadn’t been maintained in years and big branches were close to breaking. Spring came… and so did almost no blossoms. When you prune that aggressively, it can take a season to recover.
That year we got three peaches. Three. But they were perfect. I remember standing in the backyard pregnant, telling the little peanut inside me, “Soon, I’ll share these with you.” In 2019, our son Noah was born just before the buds broke again. That year, we paid attention. We thinned the fruit carefully. The peaches were perfect. A few fell to the ground. One seed sprouted.
In 2020, we found out I was pregnant again, and we needed more space. We couldn’t take the big tree with us. So, we dug up the little sapling, planted it in a pot, and brought it to our new home. In 2021, we put it in the ground. Someone said, “Volunteer saplings never grow fruit.” We shrugged. We just loved it. Now it’s 2026. The tree is thriving. Our kids run outside to check on it. Our dog steals fruit from the lower branches.