If you amended the planting hole backfill so that it was pretty different from the surrounding soil you may have created a situation where water collected around the tree and it was too wet. This can happen in a heavy soil, the amended planting hole acting as a sump under wet conditions. When new plantings consist of bare-rooted stock or others that have lost most of the small, outer roots (balled in burlap or root-pruned at planting time, as when it is found the roots have been deformed by container culture) it is not unusual for the top growth to stall for one season only. New roots will come out of the cut root ends after the top growth starts the first spring after planting but no significant elongation of roots will occur until the first fall after planting. Normal top growth therefore does not resume until the second spring after planting. Roots circle when encountering pot walls, trees and shrubs planted with circling roots do not continue to circle after planting. The old, firm sections that were in a circle when planted will retain that shape but new roots will grow away from the center of the plant. When a failed plant is dug up later and found to have most of the roots in a circle that is because it didn't make much new root growth after planting. The circling created by the container is what produces the dominant impression after the plant is pulled up because there isn't a bunch of new roots coming out from inside the old circling roots. If a plant is severely rootbound, with a fist or knot of roots near the base of the stem it may actually not be possible for very many new roots to break away from this configuration. I have examined more than a few shrubs with a turnip at the bottom of the trunk with only a few correctly oriented roots finding their way out here and there.

ouiquitt: I purchased my footies from Store Supply Warehouse, of Harrisburg, PA, tel. 1-800-823-8887. Stock number of the ones I purchased is 64106, and I think they cost $3.95 for a box of a nominal 100, which actually contained 125. Shipping costs are the same for one or several boxes. I bought two boxes, which was barely enough. Store Supply may have a website; you can look around and see. I just picked up the phone, gave them my credit card number, and the footies were on my front porch the next day via UPS. You don't give a hint of where you are located, but if you are in a temperate peach growing area there is plenty of time to buy footies for installation next spring. Since your first instinct was to try the Home Orchard Society, I am guessing you are somewhere in the West. If HOS prices are competitive, there would seem to be no emergency to obtain a product that will not be used until next May. The footies I installed last spring, using the single-tie method across the branch or twig (the stapling I initially did was awkward and unnecessary) were responsible for the largest and highest-quality peach harvest I have ever had in over 25 years of trying. Losses from oriental fruit moth damage were near zero, and the peaches colored up nicely in the footies. With the footie tied once around the twig or branch, peaches can be left on the tree to ripen much longer without danger of falling off from weight or wind. But you do have to check them once in a while to ensure they do not become overripe on the tree. And they do not stop bacterial spot on susceptible varieties if you have that disease around, which I do. Golden Jubilee had no bacterial spot at all, but Sugar Giant, a white Zaiger variety, had so much that I threw out half the peaches. For me the lesson was: Don't plant West Coast peach varieties in Northern Virginia. I thought I might be able to recycle and save used footies from year to year, but found that sunlight degrades the material so that it becomes too weak and tears easily. So I threw them all out and will start over with fresh footies next spring, but will probably buy 3 or more boxes. Well worth it. These footies are the cat's whiskers for peach growing. Don Yellman, Great Falls, VA

Back in 2006 when I first read about this ornamental cultivar, they listed the growing, flowering, and fruiting habits of the tree. They showed a photo of one in full bloom and one past bloom. They also stated that the trees produced only small, not very significant fruit. During the first growing season of the first ornamental Corinthian 'Pink' I planted in early spring of 2007, this tree displayed flowering, fruiting, and growing form, exactly as the description I read was normal for them. Even the fruits it produced that year only grew to be about half or less than the size of a green grape. It was only the current Spring in 2008 that the tree is producing what appears like they could end up being almost full-sized peaches. Corinthian 'Pink' ornamentals stay very thin because their smaller than pencil sized branches grow nearly straight up from the trunk and the tree stays very narrow even in its mature stage. In fact the branches do not seem like they are strong enough to support regular peach tree sized fruit. I will be very shocked if the tree continues to produce nearly regular sized fruit again next year.

Great picture of Fusion. My Mary Alice Stokes always looked better in a picture than in reality last year; the color in the garden was rather muddy. Will see what it is like this year. I almost missed this post.