There will be folks on here with more expertise than me. 1. Thin fruit when they are abaout golf ball sized to one every 6 inches on an established tree. 2. Spray with a fruit tree spray during the season per instructions. I spray about every 10 - 14 days. The nice thing with your tree is that despite the wet weather you had peaches, and so in Kansas you are drier than here, and might be able to stretch the spray schedule out. Do not spray when they are blooming. 3. I have no suggstions concerning birds. 4. You want to prune your tree so that it opens up to allow maximum sunlight to your fruit. In other words most growers prune out the central leader. Call the previous owner to ask the about the variety. They were undoubtedly avid gardeners and took pride in it and would be pleased that you asked and pleased that you are caring care for the tree they started. When you plant the next peach tree you can try a different variety that fruits on a different schedule to stretch out your season.

The whole growing under glass was a major trend in the mid/late 1800's, both in the northeast US and in northern Europe. For peaches the extra heat afforded in the summer under glass helped ripening times, same for grapes and citrus. It was a rich persons hobby apparently, along with race horses etc. As far as (re)-learning old lessons from these books, that one cuts both ways. There is a ton of knowledge that got lost over the years so there is a lot we can (re)-learn from them, but on the other hand they had some significant misconceptions, for example they talk on and on about this supposed disease called "peach yellows" which is now believed to just be nutritional. Re: the late summer pruning I also believe the old authors have that one right. I should pull out a few of these old books and re-read them, I was reading many of them 4-5 years ago but have not done too much lately. Check out Wright's Fruit Grower's Guide, thats one of my favorites. Fruitnut, you would enjoy reading the long sections on growing fruit under glass. I also learned a lot from their pruning descriptions, it is surprising how advanced their pruning methods were 150 years ago. Scott

I'm done thinning peaches here. Well, not really. It seems like no matter how thorough you are, you can still walk by any tree and see some fruits missed. As mentioned, earlier thinning produces bigger fruit. The article below explains why. It's my impression people new at growing peaches don't thin enough. In my own experience, I tend to under thin. I have over-thinned before but that happens only on younger trees I've thinned very early that have a thin fruit set to start with. They'll sometimes drop more fruit leaving an over thinned crop. It's common advice to thin early varieties more heavily than later ones, but I can't seem to make this advice work. Certainly early varieties need to be thinned heavily to achieve any size, but later varieties are generally so big they put too much load on the branches if not thinned aggressively. I was telling my wife the other day this business is psychotic. First you hope and pray the frost doesn't take the crop. Then, as soon as that risk is over, you go out and remove 90% of the crop. Then the rest of the season, you fight like mad to protect the 10% you have left. Some people just thin as they go, constantly removing damaged peaches, which is OK. It does put more stress on the tree (More energy is going into larger fruits that will be removed.) Also, the peaches won't be as big or as sweet, but they will be better than what you could find at the grocery store. Here is a link that might be useful: How to grow big peaches

I'm really late with this reply, but maybe it will help you next year. I keep Christmas tree lights in my fruit trees. The kind with the large bulb; the fairy lights won't help. I have the lights on a thermostat, to go on automatically when temps get down to 40 degrees. It's not a huge help, but I figure it gives me a couple of degrees more leeway, and that's often just enough. Blossoms won't normally get damaged until about 29 degrees, so if I can protect them to 26, it covers almost any spring freeze we have. If you only have 1 of each type of fruit, your problem might be lack of pollination rather than frost. 100% probability that the plum problem is lack of a pollinator. I'm supposed to be zone 5, but that's a joke. Weather is much tougher than zone 5. I'm getting fruit, so I can't see why it would be too cold in zone 7. It's May 5th and there is snow and hail going on outside my window right now. I plant cold hardy varieties and get the latest bloomers I can find. Late blooming will make a huge difference in whether or not you get fruit where there are spring freezes. I suspect I lost the crop on my earlier blooming apricot. We had several night with temps in the teens right after it bloomed. But the apricot that blooms 2 weeks later has lots of tiny baby apricots on it right now.