Early each morning during peach season, Alton Gallahan plucks a ripe fruit from one of the hundreds of peach trees at Cherry Hill Farm & Orchard in Clinton and takes a bite.
"I just pull it off the tree. Don't even peel it," Gallahan said.
Lynn Moore, president of Larriland Farm in Woodbine, prefers her tree-ripened peaches sliced and swimming in ice cold milk. Moore -- who eats fresh peaches all summer and home-canned peaches nearly every day for the rest of the year -- is also partial to peach daiquiris, peach ice cream, peaches-and-cream pie and peach cake.
Though some people believe the flavor of summer is watermelon, that diluted sweetness is too fleeting for purists like Moore and Gallahan.
For them the true taste of summer is found in the sticky juice of a tree-ripened peach, the syrupy liquid running down the chin and clinging to the palms as the peach eater savors each and every ambrosial bite.
The experience is even better if you've picked the peach yourself.
Only a handful of Maryland orchards -- including Larriland in Howard County, Cherry Hill in Prince George's County and Spring Valley Farm in Cecil County -- allow the public onto their property to pick and choose among the best fruit each one of their peach trees has to offer.
As recently as a decade ago, picking your own peaches was a common family outing in the semi-rural quarters of the state. Parents and children piled into the car for a quick trip to a nearby orchard, where an hour of labor -- performed mostly by the adults while the kids darted among the trees playing impromptu games of tag and pitching dried peach pits at one another -- yielded enough peaches, which frozen or canned, would carry the family through the coming winter.
Stan Dabkowski, president of the Maryland Direct Farm Market Association, said improvements in the wholesale peach market have made the state's pick-your-own peach operations almost obsolete. Unfavorable weather conditions during the past few growing seasons reduced the peach crop in the Baltimore-Washington area, thereby increasing demand for the fruit by the region's wholesalers, Dabkowski explained.
Better availability of migratory labor has helped make wholesaling peaches even more appealing, he said. Dabkowski believes professional picking crews are more efficient and take better care of the trees than the untrained public.
