It's Palisade Peach Season!
Coloradans favorite time of year.
August in Colorado is synonymous with one thing - Palisade Peaches. And our state goes all out during its harvest season. Multiple peach festivals are held to celebrate our homegrown fruit, charities raise money with peach-related competitions like eating contests, and every restaurant incorporates the local ingredient into their menus. Dave and I tend to indulge Forrest Gump style, with homemade peach ice cream, peach waffles, peach flavored shaved ice, peach scones, and our strangest dish to date - peach sushi.
There’s a simple reason why our peaches cause such a frenzy: they are just that delicious. Palisade peaches are grown in the town of Palisade, a little green oasis in the high desert of western Colorado. Its unique desert climate of hot days and cool nights increases the peach’s sugar content, making them bigger, sweeter, and melt-in-your-mouth juicier than an average peach. Now that you’re likely salivating (I am just writing this), let’s dive into where you can find them.
To get the full experience, you’ll want to go straight to the source. Palisade is a four-hour drive from Denver, so it’s a little bit of a haul, but visiting during the height of the harvest is such a fun experience. The town’s streets are bustling with green tractors transporting cartons of peaches onto trailers that are eagerly waiting to distribute them across the plains of Colorado. And farmers are treating visitors to tours of their orchard on horse-drawn carriages. The town is just so beautiful and lush that you forget you’re in the middle of a desert… until you look up at the colossal 11,000-foot natural wonder of Grand Mesa, the largest flat top mountain in the world, towering above the horizon.
Most orchards set up farm stands to sell their peaches, but we recommend picking them fresh off the trees at Green Barn Fruit Company’s U-Pick farm. They’ve been in Palisade since 2004, and their orchard sits on a large hill, giving peach pickers a fantastic view of the valley below. There are also some wonderful peach pastries in and around town. Our favorite treat was the soft serve peach ice cream at McLean Farms. It was a refreshing way to hold off the summer heat, and you’ll likely be welcomed by the matriarch of the family, Lila McLean, who still works behind the cash register.
If you can’t make it Palisade, then the town of Palisade will bring them to you. Their tasty peaches are also sold at pop-up roadside stands, farmer’s markets, and grocery stores across the state. Some farms even ship them nationwide, which is just downright peachy.
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