From The KOTV Vault: Crops Of Peaches, Crops Of News Stories

It's peach time in Northeastern Oklahoma. Porter peaches - ripened to perfection - are showing up in roadside stands and grocery stores all around Green Country.

"There are some 35 varieties of peaches grown around Porter. Many of them mature at different times and because of that there fresh tree ripened peaches available from mid June to mid August."

That's reporter Rex Daugherty telling us about Porter peaches back in July 1978.

In more than 60 years of TV news, we must have put together a couple of hundred stories on the peaches in Porter. Most of them sound similar: did the buds survive a spring cold snap, and how's the crop...

"We've had pretty good rainfall. We've got the prospects of a good crop. We have started production, but it'll be a couple of more weeks before we get in full swing," was the comment in 1978.

Five years later in 1983 the interview was pretty much the same:

Farmer: "The crops look pretty good. We had some early frost; it thinned some of them out, but I don't think it'll effect the final production. It took some of the blooms off, but a tree produces so many more blooms than it needs anyway that we'll be alright."
News On 6: "Were you worried about it for a while?"
Farmer: "Very much so. Because we had more than one shot of cold weather two or three times in a row, we thought we'd lost a crop, but so far everything looks like we're gonna have full crop."

Ah, every year the same the farmers fret over the weather, and we rejoice when the peach crop comes in.

Something that has changed: reporters. Today you wouldn't see Rex Daugherty from 1978 and Tim miller in 1983 out in the peach orchard in their Sunday best.

The Porter Peach Festival continues through Saturday. There's music, a car show, tractor pull, scavenger hunt, a talent show and more.

Check the activities at the Porter Peach Festival web site.