From spending his career as a medical doctor to writing a song for Lorretta Lynn, Dr. Joe McClure of Humphreys County has quite the list of accomplishments to be proud of. He and his wife, Annetta, of 65 years raised five children on their family farm and along the way, the family started growing peach trees. Now, after 20 years of cross-pollinating peach trees, Dr. McClure can add selecting a new peach variety to his list of accomplishments.
“I really wasn’t trying to develop anything or discover anything or select anything,” said Dr. McClure. “I’ve just always been interested in growing plants. I used to do some cross-pollinating with native azaleas, but I’ve always been interested in growing fruit.”
That interest led to Dr. McClure first planting several types of peach trees, and the Contender tree proved to be his favorite. From there, he began experimenting and cross-pollinating the Contender with other peach trees. 20 years later, and with guidance of Dr. David Lockwood of University of Tennessee Extension and Dr. Ksenija Gasic from Clemson University, Dr. McClure had a new type of peach.
“Dr. Gasic had grown the peach at Clemson for about three to four years, which is needed to be able to see what you’ve got. The first year it had peaches they pulled them all off trying to grow the tree, but they were able to grow two trees,” said Dr. McClure. “She called me one time and said they thought the peach deserved to be out to the public. She thought it had enough good qualities – it was the sweetest, earliest ripened and yellow peach they knew of.”
Another positive trait about Dr. McClure’s peach variety is it appears to be hardy. When most peach growers lost their peach crop to the deep freeze last December, this peach made it.
Dr. McClure adds, “It apparently has some disease resistance. We don’t see any bacterial spots or at least from what Dr. Lockwood and I have seen. It ripens early enough that you don’t have the brown rot that you do have in some of the other peaches.”
Dr. Lockwood has spent quite a lot of time with Dr. McClure and shares his belief in this peach variety as well.
“Dr. McClure is very observant, and he has spent a lot of time looking at this peach under 20 years of weather conditions. Not a lot of fruit goes through the type of scrutiny that this variety has,” said Lockwood. “It is nice to have a peach that fits into what we need in terms of chilling hours, late blooming, disease resistance and high-quality peach. This peach has a real place in our market, and I have no doubt it will expand our high-quality peach market.”
Time will tell, but the peach has its first chance at making that impact this year as Cumberland Valley Nurseries owner Phillip Pellum has helped to grow the new variety and will have seeds in his upcoming catalog.
Along this journey, Dr. McClure was stumped with a name for the new peach variety, but after the help of his granddaughter, they came up with the perfect name – Sweet Joe.
“We didn’t have a name for the peach, so my granddaughter was here one day and we were looking at peaches and she said, ‘Why don’t you just call it Sweet Joe?’ And I said, ‘Okay, that sounds good.’ So, that’s what we named it,” said Dr. McClure.
