Just peachy

My number-one peach has to be ‘red Haven’, a yellow-fleshed variety whose medium-sized fruit ripens in January. Ideal for eating raw as a dessert fruit, ‘red Haven’ is also good for cooking. Moreover, it is a freestone variety, meaning that the flesh comes away more easily from the stone than clingstone types like ‘Paragon’ and ‘Golden Haze’. What puts it to the top of my list, though, is its disease resistance, an important consideration for gardeners in the northern half of the North Island.