It’s nearing the end of apple season at the Chiles Peach Orchard in Crozet, Va., but almost all anyone can talk about right now is peaches. Well, one peach in particular.
Because this year the Chiles family grew a Guinness World Record peach — 1 pound, 13 ounces.
“This all happened right at the very end of peach season, so we’re getting all this publicity and articles,” says Henry Chiles, a fifth-generation grower. “We’re in Virginia, and it’s made the news all the way to Colorado. And it’s apple season. It’s funny, but it seems to be making news everywhere.”
Chiles says he got the idea by looking at social media posts from other peach growers, noting how close their peaches were to the record weight.
“I thought to myself, well, we might have a peach like that out on the farm this year,” he says.
While growers can prune trees and blossom thin to manage crop load and produce larger fruit, Chiles says this year’s large peaches were part mother nature, part variety.
“We had a pretty significant spring frost in April that really, really lessened our crop load, especially on some varieties, and this was one of them,” he says. “So, I kind of had my eye on a couple of big peaches on the farm, and we picked one early and weighed it and it wasn’t quite wasn’t quite a record-breaker.”
But not all was lost, as Chiles entered that peach at the county fair for the largest peach and won. And one day, Chiles says he walked through the orchard and he found what he believed to be the perfect world record-breaking peach.
“We didn’t do much extra other than what we would normally take care of the peaches. We just had the right weather conditions this year for growing monster peaches,” he says.
While growing the peach was easy, going through the process to get the peach certified as the world’s heaviest peach was not.
That’s where Ally Whitmer, Henry’s sister and also a fifth-generation farmer who focuses on special projects at the farm, came in. Whitmer says it took a lot of paperwork, videos, photos and waiting, which is not necessarily the easiest for a perishable item.
“There’s a lot of paperwork, a lot of videos, a lot of photos and a lot of waiting time, with a peach that is very perishable,” she says. “It was very nerve-wracking.”
As they awaited the results from the approval process, Chiles and Whitmer say they moved the peach around for fear that something could happen to it.
Whitmer says that once she submitted everything to Guinness World Records, she realized that they didn’t submit a witness for the weighing video. So, she had to gather up the outstanding members of the community, an agricultural specialist and more to record the weighing video one more time.
The specialist made the official measurements and listed the genus and species as part of the paperwork. And all witnesses, which included a volunteer firefighter, a local grocery owner, a businessman and more, needed to provide Guinness with credentials to verify titles and positions.
“It did lose a little bit of weight in the refrigerator,” Chiles says of the second weight attempt. “So, our world record weight is actually the refrigerator weight. It was actually even a little bit heavier when we picked it off the tree. We lost about two-hundredths of a pound just being in the refrigerator, but that’s OK. We still had enough.”
And where is the peach now?? It’s frozen as Chiles and Whitmer plan to have a 3D replica of the peach made to put on display at the family’s retail store, Chiles Peach Orchard in Crozet, Va.
As for plans to grow another heaviest peach, Chiles says he thinks he can do it again.
“I think that the record that we set this year is beatable, and I think that we probably will try to beat it again,” he says. “And I’m not saying that we’ll try every year. We do have the tree marked, and we will probably get a couple more of those trees made if we can or bought, and then, yeah, we probably will try again.”
