I Am all in.
Let's just do I Am all in with Scott Patterson an iHeartRadio podcast.
Hey everybody, Scott Patterson, I Am all in again a podcast one eleven productions, iHeartRadio, iHeart Media, iHeart Podcast Season one episode to lorelized first day at Chiltern one on one interview guest with Peaches. In the episode, we have very special guests. Mary Pearson is joining us. Hello, Mary, thank you so much for joining us. And you're joining us from where? What part of the.
Country We're in, Central Georgia.
Central Georgia County, Peach County. Let me tell everybody a little bit about Mary. Very fascinating young lady, the wife of a fourth generation farmer, Al Pearson. She turned her husband's fresh peaches and pecans into cakes, pies, cookies, and jellies. She loved sharing these creations with friends and neighbors, sparking the creation of Pearson family's mail order business. Many of her original family recipes are still used today, continuing the
tradition of homemade treats from Mary's kitchen. Pearson Farms, located in Fort Valley, Georgia, has been operated by the Pearson family for listening to this over one hundred and thirty five years one three five, that's right, one hundred and thirty five years producing high quality peaches and pecans. Handpicked peaches and farm grown pecans are central to their offerings, and the farm's mail order business allows customers to enjoy
these products nationwide. Mary, welcome, thank you, honor to have you. So we're introduced.
To suit.
Well, let's talk a little bit about your background and what your day to day is over there. When did you sort of start getting your hands dirty in the family business and and and really growing this out as a mail order business.
Well, we decided to open a store on I seventy five, the year of the Olympics that they were going to be in Atlanta, and I thought we were going to get a lot of business. And we always wanted to take our peaches to people that we could hear back from and say, oh wow, they were so good or they were terrible. You know, we never got any feedback because we didn't have computers, We didn't you know, you didn't do email any of that.
So we just really wanted to take it to people.
And the farm was not a place where you would come to buy, so we started this mail or business, and it just ended up being it was retail store, but it ended up being everybody wanted things that we've made in the kitchen there, and so we that's kind of how it got started. And so I started with recipes in my kitchen and then I would take those to the farm and we'd play around with it, and that's kind of how it got started. And everything was
coming from my kitchen. So they named it Mary's Kitchen, and that's kind of how that got started.
Fascinating. So that's nineteen ninety six, if I'm mistaken, Okay, So that was the Atlantic Limits nineteen ninety six, And so you nineteen ninety six just started off, you one person. Maybe I had a little bit of help. What's it grown into?
No? I had a lot more help.
You had a lot more help.
Right.
We opened up a store, and as it turned out, the Olympics sent everybody down Alabama, not seventy five, so we could go stand on the interstate. There was nobody coming down there. But we had jellies and we ordered stuff out of house. We weren't making it then, but we changed that and then we got too popular and with the mail orders especially people wanting stuff once I got home, so we moved it to the farm and started cooking there and making everything we make comes from there.
And I didn't want to use a lot of preservatives. I didn't know how to do that. So everything, really, even to this day, is just no corn syrup, no things that are unhealthy. Of course, you've got sugar, which is not healthy, right, that's all.
Well, yeah, well in the episode, we're introduced to Suki in this episode of Gimore Girls played by Melissa McCarthy, when she's a chef at the Independence in and then we meet Jackson Douglas who plays fruit Man, and he's a fruit supplier and he provides fruits and vegetables Suki and peaches. They're dealing with peaches in this episode, and Suki's very particular about her peaches, as she should be
and her other produce. So we see Suki in the kitchen smelling and inspecting a batch of peaches, and Suki says they're smaller than the last batch, and Fruitman says, no, they're not, and Suki says, smaller means watery, no good peach taste. Fruit Man says, no, there's plenty of peach taste being as there you know peaches all right, Laura Lei takes a bite, she takes, she tastes and believes they taste watery as well. So Suki then takes the peach and rolls it along the floor. She claims they're
rolling differently because of the extra water. First of all, Mary, can a peach be too watery? Can you determine that by rolling it on the ground?
Now, I've never heard that, but I can tell you that peach can be too watery. In fact, I ask a group of peach farmers from some other state why their peaches were not very sweet, and they said, because we fill them with water the last ten days of growing seasons, so they get really big and pretty, but they're not sweet.
Interesting do you go ahead?
Sorry?
Well, so this year in particular, we had such sweet peaches and big peaches because we irrigate, but they were so sweet because we didn't have any rain.
They were so good.
So the fruit itself struggles for relevance. I guess you could say it struggles to just kind of like wine. Grapes deprived of rain, right, are more flavorful, have a deeper, richer flavor and that's it very interesting. Do you grow other fruits or crops alongside the peaches? I mean, you know we mentioned pecans.
We grow pecans, and we also are growing plums now, oh boy, which are really good because there it's like you grow them in your own backyard. It's not a it's they're not really big necessarily, but they are so sweet.
What are we talking about? What kind of I mean? Is it acres and acres of of peaches? I mean, these are peach trees. These are these are.
Yes, peach trees.
And they're not tall, they're not grown like they are in California where they use ladders because it's more and California the land is is worth so much more per acre. And in Georgia, you know it's not that expensive. So you put more peaches peach trees on an acre. And so we picked my hand. We don't grow them tall, We grow them out in flasty interesting and there, how may we have probably twenty five hundred acres I guess of peaches?
Oh my?
And twenty did you say twenty five hundred acres of peaches of peach trees? And what is how many trees per acre? Would you say one hundred and twenty one hundred and twenty times twenty five hundred how many peaches per tree?
Well, you probably knock off two thousand peaches before they get right, I mean when they're little, you'll knock them off because if you don't knock them off, then you'll have small peaches. And then we might get three hundred to four hundred peaches on a tree.
Okay, sorry, sorry, So we're talking. So let's say, and my support stuff, please do the math on this, because I'm fascinated with this. Three hundred and fifty times one hundred and twenty five times twenty five hundred, and let's get that number. And that's and what is the peach season? What's the best season for these?
We start picking peaches middle of May, okay, and we finished the first or second week in August, okay.
And then they have to be and what's the processing, like, what do you have to do to prepare them for market?
Well, we actually when we start we pick them all by hand of course.
Right right, we're talking one hundred and five million peaches that need to be farmed approximately, that need to be that need to be picked right every season. Right, that's a lot of labor. How many people are you hiring to do that?
There may be as many as two hundred two hundred and we have have housing, transportation, and but we when we pick peaches there one tree might get picked four or five times.
In one season, right, because they're.
All different varieties. We might have thirty five different varieties of peaches, and some produce in July August, some do in May, and so there might be that different period of time, like three weeks that these peaches are getting ready on one tree. If they all got ready at one time, if that, you know, we couldn't pick them all. Right, that's why we have different varieties that are you know, some are a yellow peach, some are more of a
red peach. As you get into peace season by about the third week in June, then they're become freestone, which means they don't cling to that seed, and so they're easier to cut away from the seed from the cling to it.
And then you you get these peaches, these one hundred and five plus million peaches processed, cleaned, packaged, and are you you you must have deals with all the grocery stores in the area and the region and probably shipping them out of state even I would, amae. So you have some kind of a serious operation over there.
We do.
And we have a wonderful nephew who is a born salesman, so when he graduated from college, he eventually came back to sell and so that's who sells all of our peaches. And he could sell anything. I mean, he is so good.
And he is a year.
Older than my son. Our nephew doesn't want to grow anything, and our son doesn't want to sell anything, so they work well together.
Okay, so you're getting purchase orders from all over all the time. What's the largest purchase order you've received so far? How many peaches are involved in that purchase order?
It's truckloads.
So have you ever gotten a purchase order for let's say, one hundred two hundred thousand peaches going to one place?
Yes?
Wow.
And one company that we that we've been dealing with for a long time is called Tree Ripe and they come down and get truckloads of boxes of peaches and take them back to Wisconsin, open up the back of the truck and people stand in line and just get those boxes of peaches. Every year they look forward to it, so they've been. We've probably sold to them thirty or forty years.
That's fantastic.
It's been really neat seeing people and becoming friends with them.
We just go everywhere.
Let me ask you this, what are you most proud of in terms of the way your farm operates?
Family, it's the way that we've had. The Pearsons have come down really since eighteen eighty five, so it's really more than one hundred and thirty five years when they started, and there were twelve original Pearsons, six boys and six girls, and then they followed down to my father in law. He was the son that farmed, and then it went to my husband and now it's to my son. Wow, so it's and now he's got two sons that are
also interested in it. But it's hard work and it's my son is he's gone at six in the morning and he didn't get home till ten at night. And that's that's from the first of May to the middle of August. So it's not easy, but it's but it's very gratifying, even more now than it ever has been because the response that we get from people who just love the peaches, it's a very romantic fruit. And when you bring somebody a basket of peaches, they're like, wow.
You know, that's beautiful. It's just different than a lot of other fruits.
That's a great story. It's been in the family since eighteen eighty five. It stayed in the family. Just just a wonderful legacy and it will continue correct, It'll continue on to the next generation.
And it's seasonal, you know, And I think sometimes that's what makes people love them so much is you can't get them all.
Year, right, it doesn't mean you stop working right now, and there's there's always work to do, even off season. Yeah, right, that's when the preparation is.
Yes, yeah, So what.
Are some of the biggest talent challenges you face in peach farming?
Probably, well, frost and cold is one thing, because every year we're faced with, you know, the peaches will bloom, maybe the March the tenth is usually the peak of bloom. And then after that it's they have to get enough
cold hours. And that's very scientific and different varieties will require a different number of cold hours and it has to be by February the tenth with degrees forty five degrees and under that they have to have that many hours and some will require eight hundred hours, some require twelve hundred hours. So it's just different. And year before last we had five percent of a crop because they all got killed with the cold came in like last week in March, first week in April, and that's you know,
there's nothing we can do. We can put out fans. We have a couple of big fans that we can do. We can do some fires to warm it up, but nothing really with that many acred it's hard to contain that.
Oh boy, well, hopefully not, Hopefully that's doesn't happen again.
Right, It happened in nineteen fifty five and that was the last time.
Oh really, Okay, well that's good. Are there any tips that you can share for selecting the perfect peach for you know some of your top recipes.
Well, it probably needs to have Pierson Farm label on it. That's the guarantee right there. And then after that, you know, you can smell them. And a lot of people will say, well, the peaches I buy in the grocery store, they're so hard, I just I don't want to buy them. And my answer to that is that if they aren't hard when we ship them, then they'll be mush when they're in the grocery store. Right, But there's a difference in being
being ready to pick and picking them green. So they have to be ripe, but they just can't be soft yet, right, So, and you don't want to squeeze them because that's not good. You'll just bruise the peach.
Right.
What's your favorite peach recipe?
I love kale salad with peaches and our peconds. I do a crumble pecond so I put that in there too, but you just besiage the kale and then you put the fresh peaches in there and it's all in vinegar.
It's so good.
Oh my, I haven't had lunch. You're killing me right now.
And then the peach cobber.
We do a lot of it, and that's it's a real simple recipe, but it's it's just good. It has been the same recipe for years.
What did you have some unique savory dishes that feature peaches other than salads?
I mean, there are lots of recipes out there, but I do a lot of the grilled peaches and you just put olive oil on them and then you grill them until they're brown and kind of soft and then you flip them over and put whip cream.
Or yogurt in the middle. Oh, hello, that's good.
And then there's I love the peach and avocado salad. And you know, you don't think about mixing those too, but when you slice them, they're they're just really good.
Peach and avocado. Yeah, that answers my next question to surprising ingredients that pair beautifully with peaches.
And there you go, avocado, avocado, and also mozzarella cheese. You know the capristi salad, you using tomatoes, you use peaches and mozzarella.
Really good.
I think I'm going to try that.
Mm hmmm.
Uh.
Do you prefer using peaches fresh, grilled, baked, or preserved when cooking?
Fresh?
But always fresh.
Always fresh? But I can.
You can freeze peaches and they taste like fresh peaches when you saw them out.
It's very different from a can peach.
Mh.
And a lot of people will use canned peaches in their cobbler, but it's not the same. I do freeze peaches because we do a lot of freezing of peaches at the farm, so we'll have enough coming into the season.
Is that right?
As we do ice cream?
Okay, peach ice cream, and it's it's really good, but it has to have fresh peaches, and right, so we do a good bit of freezing of peaches in the summer when they get really, really really sweet in the middle of June July.
I mean, they're really good.
All right.
I'm gonna throw some recipes at you, peach recipes, and you tell me if this sounds familiar. Okay, peach combler classic dessert made with fresh or canned peaches. Right, Let's let's use Mary's peaches topped with a buttery biscuit or a cake like dough and baked until golden and bubbly, serve warm with ice cream. How's that sound?
It sounds good. I've never made it like that. You made, no?
I mean the one I use is just so easy. It's just a cup of flour, a cup of cup of silf rise and flour, a cup of sugar and a cup of milk, and you melt a stick of butter. You pour that with vanilla over the butter, and then you lay the peaches on top.
Mm hmm.
Couldn't be easier.
Sounds great?
Uh.
Speaking of surprising combinations, peach and prescudo pizza, an Italian twist on a classic pizza using sliced peaches, arugula, and goat cheese, all drives old with a bosama reduction. The sweet peaches and salty prescudo create a mouthwatering contrast of flavors. Does that sound That kind of sounds like what you're talking about with surprising combinations. Here's another one. Peach salsa a fresh fruit right, A fresh fruity salsa made with dice, peaches,
red onion, jalapenos, cilantro, lime juice. It pairs well with grilled chicken, pork, or fish. Man, Mary, I'm getting so hungry, I just really getting hungry. And last, but not least, let's not forget about the peach billini, a sparkling cocktail made with pure aid, peaches and prosecco, perfect for brunch or summer parties. Yeah, my goodness, it was a pleasure speaking with you, Mary, and thank you for taking the time.
I know you must be very, very busy, and gosh, I hope that somebody uh uh, Emma, can you can you get with Mary here so we can get some peaches and pecans for for God's sake, I'm so hungry right now that I'd just like to order directly from the source.
Right now, I have to ask you, yes, you are you a good cook since you ran a restaurant in the in your program.
I'm I'm a good cook at what I cook because I've been cooking for so long. It's it's it's the basis of my relationship with my wife, who I cooked for all the time when we were dating. Uh. I used to cook for myself when I was you know, pursuing uh things in my early life careers, in my early life. So yeah, I've always been fancied myf a little. I wouldn't say chef level, but I make a pretty mean salmon a couple different ways. I love making chicken. I love a grill and a steak, you know. I
make all kinds of different salads and things like. I just I really love to cook. I enjoy it so much. It relaxes me. My favorite time with my family is you know, five o'clock, I start, I start cooking, and everybody helps me out, and it's just I just love it. I love feeding people. I love sitting around with the people I love and eating and and just you know, tell them stories. And telling jokes whatever you know, how it is, it's just it's just there's nothing better in life.
But it has been a pleasure of meeting you, Mary, and continued success with your wonderful business that's been around since eighteen eighty five. It's a family business and everybody check out the Pearson Farm located in Fort Valley, Georgia. Also visit Mary's Kitchen and you can get probably the best peaches in the United States, if not the entire world at Pearson Farm and Mary's Kitchen. And there she
is right there, the one and only. Thank you so much for spending some time with us and continued good luck and success with your business and best your family.
Thank you. I appreciate it.
All right, take care, Hey, everybody
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