Those are doubles. Remove them if there are normal singles. Often they crack and rot. Removing one side helps sometimes but the fruit is still more likely to fail or rot.

Doubling is caused by heat stress when the flower buds form the summer prior to blooming. So there is little you can do about it except to remove the affected fruit. Usually in peaches there are plenty of normal fruit and all the bad ones can be removed in the first thinning pass.

@fruitnut: would it be better if, when i find a bloom that i can tell will be a double, to pull it out before the bloom falls away?

I only live like 40-50 miles from Fredericksburg, TX (peach country) and my red globe is a HUGE variety down here...so I know peaches do well down here. Do you think that the trees in Frederiksberg have the same problems!? I would think that "heat stress" would be a moot point down in SOUTH TEXAS!!!!

Vertigo, not much you can do. Some varieties are more prone to doubling than others, and as your tree matures, believe me, you'll have plenty of fruit set, so removing the doubles will be no big deal. I see this fairly frequently on my trees, since we can have periods high temps in our summers. I just thin the doubles, and now, in my 3rd year for most of my peaches, I'm thinning much more than just the doubles :-)

Patty S.

Your Redglobe should do fine if it gets enough chilling. I liked it in Amarillo. I doubt that it will have too many doubles. There will be plenty of good fruits. Pull them off early if you want but it won't change anything.

The biggest issues in Fredericksburg are lack of chilling and spring freezes. In your picture there are leaf buds not pushing. If the whole tree is like that it may not have gotten enough chilling this winter. Are you in an area that is warmer in winter than Fredericksburg? If so you may need lower chill varieties.

Actually this year we got at least a hundred hours or more of 45 and below. Im new to this whole chill thing. But I have even heard chatter from Freds. about how this year is going to be a bumper crop from how cold it was down here! If I remember correctly Red Globe only needs 40-45 hours?

normally it is mostly misty and chilly down here for winter. But late Dec-early Feb we get lots of 45 or lower temps. Freds. actually had a freeze in LATE MARCH. And we will be dipping down into the mid 40's for the next three days...which is pretty much unheard of this time of year!

Redglobe is listed by Womack's nursery as 850 hours. It may not be that high but it's not a low chilling variety either.

Are you Austin or San Antonio?

Could you post a picture of the whole tree? Does it have a lot of leaves or lots of bare wood as in your picture above?

holy cow! I live right between San Antonio and New Braunfels. I know we had a colder than normal winter...but have no way of knowing how many hours. is there some where to look that up?

And the growth on the tree only started about...2-3 weeks ago. Every day I go out there to stare at it there is new growth!

This is a picture from 7 days ago, the first full shot I took a few mins ago.

Your tree shows classic symptoms of lack of chilling. It has about 5% of the vegetative buds pushing that it should have. The vegetative buds need chilling to grow properly just like the fruit buds.

What you need going forward is fruit trees adapted to your area. That probably means a medium chill peach with some options in the link below. The link also has a chill hrs map. What you got this year doesn't matter as much as what you might average going forward. You are better off with varieties requiring less chilling rather than more unless you get late freezes that might kill flowers on an early blooming tree.

Here is a link that might be useful: Texas peaches

This post was edited by fruitnut on Wed, Apr 17, 13 at 13:22