About 15 tears ago, my husband mail ordered a Red Haven peach tree from his favorite tree nursery. He planted this stick of a tree in our backyard where we could watch it grow from our house. It grew quickly and every year in July, it produced many beautiful Red Haven peaches. They ripen within a few weeks, keeping us busy eating them, canning and making jams and sharing them with family and friends. The season comes quickly and leaves quickly.

Along the way, the tree began leaning toward a pergola structure, scraping the paint and starting to cause some minor damage. We had to come up with two solutions. One, make the peach season last longer and two, get the tree from leaning on the pergola.

With both ideas on his mind, my husband took out his new electric chainsaw and down came ¾ of the peach tree. I was in the house shrieking “Oh no”! The tree no longer was a threat to the pergola and the limb was ready to cleft-graft with another type of peach. A bocce ball friend of my husbands had an unnamed peach tree with peaches that ripened in August and provided him with several scions. The grafting was completed in 2013. Last year the tree grew back partially and produced a few Red Haven peaches. The graft was growing.

This year (2015), an amazing thing happened. The tree grew and survived, the graft took and we had a crop of delicious Red Haven peaches in July and a large crop of the unnamed peaches in August. That all of this happened during a drought year is beyond my comprehension and quite a miracle.