Frank,
I have 2 Reliance and 2 Contenders that made it through the winter. No blossoms. I have just added a Madison, a PF 27 Cold Hardy, and a Saturn. These came with blossoms which I will pick off and hope for the best. However I am consoled by the fact that my Burbank, Santa Rosa, and Oka plums are covered in blossom buds. If they miss the frosts I will be happy. The Waneta also looks good. My 2 Bosc pears are having their first real good blossom so there is reason to be happy with out peaches. Good work on getting nice young trees and blossoms.

I'm in North Jersey and my young contender has already flowered. I will need to thin. I had alot of flowers and 2 mature fruits last year in it's 2nd year, and now I'm looking forward to this season. : )

My Harrow Diamond. Toronto, Canada. 4 years old.

Ravi

{{gwi:101260}}

bberry-
Where did you get the PF 27 from? I've read about that one.
How old are the bosc pears and whats pollinating them?

My Superior/Alderman plums are full of blossoms, and so is a 3 year old apple (i THINK its a McIntosh, but i'll have to check my notes...).

Thanks for the responses. A few fruit is better then no fruit!

My flowers dropped about a week ago (peaches & plums). When will I know if I have fruit growing or not?

Thanks.

Kniles:

Most blossoms initially appear to set fruit. But many, if not most, do not grow because of lack of pollination. When you see an individual peach start to grow and fatten up ahead of all the others, then you know, and that could be as much as a week or more in your climate. That is the time to thin if the fast-growing peaches are closer than 6-8 inches.

Don Yellman, Great Falls, VA

Frank-
I just noticed this post after I posted about my Reliance and it's lack of blossoms.
several of my 2 year old apples are about ready to blossom so I think I'm out of luck for peaches this year.

Well I am way behind you guys. I just noticed a little green starting on my 2 Contender trees. Not close to flowering. I hope it is not to late. We had a extremely cold winter this year. I also planted 2 more peach trees both being PF 24C Cold hardy. I know Don will say I am crazy for planting more, but as long as they are not dead I will keep trying!

Have you looks for flower buds? They should be swelling up.

Frank,
All of the new peaches came from Grandpa's Orchard and I will have to say they were nice looking young bare root trees.
The Boscs are around 10-11 years old and it has been a long dry spell. I have a Bartlett, Anjou and Chojura that also have blooms on them so I should get pollination. I just grafted a bunch of Olympic Giant, Ya Li, and Tsu Li around the yard and added an Ayers pear from St Lawrence. I also have a 20 year old Superior that is a lot of work to keep going. It is a borer magnet. Even one fruit from this plum makes the work worthwile. Never had one to equal it!
Jerry

I do have a few flower buds that are starting to swell on my 4 year old Reliance. This tree had 10 peaches that ripened last year, and grew quite a lot last season. I was very optimistic about getting many this year. But there will be few peaches. Few is better than none.

Frank,
I think there are flower buds swelling, but me being a novice I am not sure which ones are flower buds! I still have never seen a peach on a tree before. There are some buds that appear to be bigger than the others, I am hoping those are the flowers. We will see. Yours have really bloomed nicely. Do you think this is way to late for not even green?

Seems very late. Even mine are later then last year by a couple weeks and i ate ripe fruit on Aug 1. So this year i'll be eating fruit (maybe) later then that (most likely?). It really sucks that i didn't end up with a lot more flowers. I thought winter was bad, but overall temps weren't extreme (no record cold temps). Wish i knew what it was. If i had outside stairs leading down to my basement, i'd have a few trees in large containers. I'd store them down there during the nasty stuff *mid Dec-Mar* I stored a few large banana corms down there and they did just fine.

I still do not have any formed flowers on my 4th year Reliance as of Sunday, but several pink flower buds swelling. Since last year was the first year it flowered, I am also inexperienced with peach trees. Last year I seem to recall the entire tree being covered in blooms, and no leaves were out. This year the leaves are coming, but no flowers yet.

This was a consistently cold winter. We had temps down around 20 below a couple nights and lots of howling wind when it was cold. I grow quite a few roses. Winter winds and cold dry out rose canes and can kill the bush. My roses were fine this year due to the snow cover.

Peach trees and roses are closely related, so I have to believe that the cold and wind played a role.

And now I wonder about the role of a late spring, as well.

The flowers on both my peaches came before the leaves. If you have leaves, sounds like no peaches this year! :(

If I need to thin, 6-8 inches, I will have to remove alot of fruits.

Goodground:

You do need to thin to 6-8 inches, preferably 8, and you will have to remove a lot of fruits if you want nice peaches. Leave the largest, fastest growing peaches, and take off all the rest. All.

Don Yellman, Great Falls, VA

Well I too feel I wont get any peaches either. I still really have no green and they seem to stuck. I see a small bit of green. I know last year when they bloomed they bloomed before the green. I dont think we have seen two days in a row of 70 degrees yet and it even snowed a little on Saturday.

Well, I'm not in zone 4/5 - I checked the map and I appear to be in 7b. But I finally have peaches this year and so I just had to show them off. We have been in this house 5 years, I believe the tree to be about 10 years older than that (according to tree service). We have had a terrible time with pests, frost, and some well-intentioned but badly done pruning. I did not thin because I didn't know I was supposed to, but it's looking good so far. There are a few that are just starting to go a bit red, so I think we're just a few weeks away!

http://im1.shutterfly.com/procserv/47b8db33b3127ccec44d9a24f9e100000076108AYsW7dw3bswe3nwk

NC Chicky:

I looked at your photo, and if the rest of your tree looks like that little segment, those peaches are way, way too close to develop into decent fruit. They should be a minimum of 6 inches apart, but 8 or even 10 inches is much better. Not only will the quality of the fruit suffer from such crowding, the branches could easily become overloaded and break, leaving you with nothing but some hard peaches.

I don't understand how, in NC, your peaches do not seem to have been bothered by the the plum curculio or oriental fruit moth, which are major pests of peaches in most of the mid-Atlantic. Either you are in a fortunate spot where these pests are not present, or you are regularly spraying your trees with an effective insecticide.

I have to bag my peaches in nylon footies after thinning to protect them from insects without constant spraying or I would end up with nothing worthwhile on my peach trees. I think your peaches are around 6 weeks or more from ripe and would still thin them to try to grow a few good peaches.

Don Yellman, Great Falls, VA

It looks like I won't have peaches this year. My tree has leaves on the youngest branches, but no flowers. Although, I seem it recall it having leaves first last year too and the flowers came later. I was going to plant a new tree to replace it but had to promise my husband I wouldn't spend any more on gardening right now. New roofs are awfully expensive.

my elberta has some blossoms, but i think they're about ready to fall - what i've been wondering about is pollination, because of the later spring I really haven't seen any pollinators out and about

I may have a few blossoms tomorrow, but I was thinking the same thing. Not many flowers, mostly cloudy tomorrow, and apparently no bees in our inhospitable midwest environment.

NCCHICKY Thanks for the post, they look very nice!! Now I really feel behind!!

I am glad to here that im not the only with a slow start this year. I have not seen any bees around at all this year. I believe that is why I didnt get peaches last year is because there were no bees.

I checked again last night see some small green leaves coming, but I am not sure still which are flower buds and which are not?

{{gwi:85071}}

Look like this...

Thanks Frank for the picture. That helps!

I see you have green leaves before your flowers emerge. I still just have a little green coming out of the buds, so I may still have some hope?? You must have been alot warmer than we have been. I have apple and apricot trees that are father along than the peach trees. I thought peach trees were such early bloomers?

Do your peaches get full sun? MY apples JUST opened their flowers yesterday. So the peaches had them beat by a good week or more. My plums bloomed about 2 weeks ago.

There could still be some hope, but if you look over all the branches, you'll see if there are flowers.

I really hope next summer can be a record harvest here at Franks Peach Patch :)

They get full sun and are right beside my Apple Trees. I just think everything is very late. We got down to 28 degrees last night.

Hope you get your record peaches!

Just checked my 2nd year reliance again. It has 20 blossoms. Not sure if they will all be viable. All of my Reliance and Contenders made it and are sprouting but only one has blossoms. Even a contender graft done last year finally opened it's buds. If the frosts stay away this could be a big fruit year.

Yippee!

I've been reading your posts and seeing the pictures of trees covered in blossoms with great envy. I planted 2 trees last year, trying some zone creep, although the location used to have a peach tree that produced peaches many years ago. I planted a Reliant and an Intrepid. Didn't expect much this year although the trees did well last year.

I checked things out last weekend and had leaves starting to appear, but no swelling alongside that would possibly indicate any buds might appear. Tonight I checked them again, and both trees have several flower buds. Where there was nothing last weekend, now there are some buds as big as a tooth. They really jumped despite the continuing cold!

Supposed to get a taste of spring for the next week, climbing rapidly to the 70's and into the 80's for a while.

Winter was very stable and long--gradual cool down, not terribly cold, but it just never warmed up. Had low -20's several times in late Jan/early Feb., then 4 on the 13th of April as everything was starting to swell buds. Figured that would have finished off any peach flowers in the unlikely event a 2nd year tree was going to have any. Apparently at least a few survived anyway. Whether or not they set any fruit, at least they survived the winter and had blossoms.

The cold in April did pretty well clean out the apricot blossoms as they were starting to swell nicely. However, maybe 10% survived on some trees, and they have now been blooming for the past week. Spring is very late here.

Surprises happen!

beeone=

Late June 2003 i left Wisconsin and it was in the 80's and very humid. By night fall i was 9000ft in the Big Horn Mountains clearing snow from my car!!! Ended up leaving the next morning and driving through one of the largest tornado outbreaks in history (South Dakota). Never travel without consulting the weather websites.

Good to hear you have peaches. Everything is very late this year. Mother Nature owes us a LONG warm fall.

I agree. Anyway, I went out and bought a Madison peach. I had to get a potted one as the bareroots were gone. It has flowers already, so I might get peaches next year. I don't know why my old tree doesn't have any flowers this year. Maybe it is biennial. But both my one year Honeycrisp and my two year old Danube has lots of blooms on them.

Frank: Due to the elevation, snow can happen any month of the year on the Big Horns. Have driven across them in the middle of June with several inches of snow, or gotten up in the morning up there on top in July and had heavy frost on everything, although it was over 70 during the day.

Not to go off topic, I don't think our common fruits will grow up there on top, even though it is probably technically a zone 4 or even 5 min. temp. climate. The tops of the mountains just stay above the deep cold in winter, but what they get lasts forever.

Despite the nasty cold shot we got in mid April, I'm pleased with the way things are coming out. Just awfully late to have things still leafless and coming out of dormancy. At least the blooms that do come out should make because we are about out of time for hard frosts for the season.

hey franktank,

by golly in an earlier thread u mentioned in year 2 i may have peaches and i'll be darned if i don't have 4 blossoms ! bad news is my trees are so small i must pull any fruits if it actually sets. nectar peach as far as variety.

i even have 4 blossoms on a black tartarian cherry i planted last year. daggone it though so far i have no blossoms on any other sweet cherry i can try to hand pollinate it with close by. not much in the way of insect activity yet except by the ubiquitous ants and yellow jackets. im watching a bing beside it but its just breaking bud and it looks like no blooms.

wildlifeman

I'd let the peaches stay. If the tree thinks it shouldn't carry them, they'll drop. If not, you get to eat a few homegrown peaches :) Too bad you don't have a sweet cherry in your neighborhood.

Bighorns are beautiful... Whatever road i was on going down through this canyon was just amazing. Lot of nice overlooks up there.

Hi everyone......our Reliance tree here in Missouri is loaded with peaches, last year we lost all fruit to freeze. I know I'll need to thin to probably 8" especially because it's young,on it's 3rd year. The sun is behind the woods trees heading towards sunset or I'd grab a picture. Tomorrow.

My question is....some of the fruit is about nickle size, the weather has been on the cool side and mostly rainy but today and for the next hopefully 5 days it's supposed to be sunny and warmer nights. I'm thinking that means fruit insects.

So after reading previous threads I thought I should start bagging. I used zip lock sandwich size, but I'm not sure! After just a few hours I just checked and there is moisture inside the bag around the peach.

I only snipped about 1/2" off the bag tips should I
enlarge that hole for better ventilation? Take the bags back off (I only did about 15)let peaches dry out? try again? we've had a lot of rain! The ground is very soggy. I could order the booties but I'll be out of town all next week.

Are there any pictures showing what the insect damage looks like, so far all I've seen are small chewed out like indents on a few peaches.

The really loaded one is Reliance, the Hale Haven has fewer but good, the SureCrop Nectarine has smaller yet.

The apples flowered fairly well and bees were doing their job but they now seem to have less fruit setting I guess due to all the wetness? Nothing on the plum at least that I have found, we had several bouts of frost.

So, any ideas? can I short term protect the trees with anything? I should have ordered the booties!

Thank you very much for your help! This will be our 1st yr of actual fruit.

Willgarden:

You are right, you should have ordered the footies for peaches, and it's not too late. Store Supply Warehouse, 1-800-823-8887 can have a box (144) of women's footies (Stock #54-106) on your doorstep the day after you call. Cost is $4.94 plus UPS.

Plastic ziplocs are inappropriate for peaches, which will rot in the bags and become infested with insects like earwigs. But the footies work fine, tied right over the branch with a single tie because they allow the peaches to dry out.

The insect damage you describe could be plum curculio or something else. Whatever it is, the peaches need protection before bagging. I spray peaches with permethrin before thinning and bagging, and stop after the bags are on. Warmer nights will surely bring out the insects. If the cool and damp weather persists, you may also have trouble with fungal diseases such as mildews on peaches. I add a fungicide to my spray in these conditions to reduce these white and rust-colored mildew patches, which will also result in a ruined peache.

When you thin, select for the largest, fastest-growing peaches untouched by insect damage. This may in many cases leave the peaches farther apart than 8 inches, but that's fine, especially on a 3rd year tree. Smaller and insect damaged peaches have no future.

Don Yellman, Great Falls, VA

Thank you Don.....I removed the plastic bags and ordered the footies, btw the person who processed my order said the stock # you posted was incorrect. Idunno.

About fungal disease, the apple trees have rust color on the some of the leaves. Any advice about what that is and what to do about it?

About thinning, most of the largest peaches are on the tips of the branches, I hate to take those off but it seems like it would make sense to.

if you put "store supply warehouse" in your search engine it will pop up and you can order on-line

also my first bee sighting of the year yesterday; unfortunately, he was in my house (i'm allergic) so my sons has to chase him out - he was not a happy bumble. later that afternoon, i spotted a couple more outside.

Willgarden:

You are right. The stock number I provided should have been 64-106. Glad you did not buy some unknown thing.

You can actually bag a peach near or at the end of a branch by tying the footie around it. This is assuming there are no other large peaches on the same twig or near the end of the branch, in which case you would select one closer in.

Footie quality from Store Supply is better this year than last -- while they seem slightly smaller, they are very strong and stretchy, and there are no runs in them at all. Last year they had quite a few runs, and the material seemed easier to tear.

The Chinese are improving their footie technology.

Don Yellman, Great Falls, VA

Don, I have been pulling the outer fruitlets on the end of the branches leaving the closer ones that are on thicker wood. Do I still need to thin the peaches that are within 6 inches from each other but on different branches? Thanks

Goodground:

There are no thinning rules that apply in all situations, only common sense and judgment -- and maybe a dose of experience. Normally, peaches on different branches would not affect each other's growth, but if the branches are right on top of one another, there could be a sunshine issue.

Sun is just as important to ripening out large, high-quality peaches as having them properly spaced. When I begin thinning a tree, I prune it for sun exposure first, then thin the remaining branches for spacing. The pruning alone usually takes down about half the peaches.

Don Yellman, Great Falls, VA

Don

Do you think you could post pictures of your peach trees? I would love to see your footies in place and see how your trees are pruned. I know I need to do pruning,because I am sure you cant put footies on 15 foot trees! or do you?
Thanks

Ok, one last one for me. I have another peach tree that has been around for close to 20 years or so (it was purchased as an apricot, but when it leafed out I knew it wasn't). Have had 1 blossom on it twice, probably 5 years apart. It is now getting crowded, so I decided finally this winter that I would take it out this year after giving it one last chance to bloom. Then tonight, I see it has at least 8 blossoms open. We'll see what happens. Sometimes I think it pays to explain to a tree what is going to happen next year if it doesn't bloom. The apricot rootstock 2 feet from it had best, most beautiful apricots on it last year after threatening (at least 2" in diameter). So this year the peach was getting the ax to make room for the apricot. Now it is is doing something, I'll have to go to another plan. At least it is a good bloom year so far!

Yesterday i found 2 more flowers on my largest tree. Way up high! The one is near the top.

I wonder. Should i start removing a lot of branches that have no fruit on them (2 year wood) and make room for more new wood? My tree is about as big as i want it to get (10 or so feet)... I think i will.

Hi all!

I started bagging my peaches yesterday, saw no evidence of any insect damage. It rained overnight and now I wonder about the damp footies against the fruit, it's very humid today. I'm in south central Missouri Ozarks(I need to change my profile page from Colorado). Now I'm unsure whether to continue or leave some undone? I haven't sprayed with anything.

Today I noticed clear jelly globs on some of the unbagged peaches, a bunch of this stuff just over night! Is this from the plum curculio? how long before this goop does anything? and how should I dispose of the affected peaches?

Also, as I was thinnning and bagging I noticed some peaches had light whitish circles on them. I'm guessing this is some sort of fungus? I picked the ones I found. Do you think sprinkling corn meal over the tree would help?

The peaches are a little bigger than the size of a quarter, I suppose I was very fortunate not to have had more insect problems before now. I was out of town the past 10 days.

Thank you for any help!

Hi, I am looking for larger Contender peach stock, they announced that they will grow, hopefully, for me on my farm. when I contacted my supplier, they said it would be 2-3 years before they can get me some trees. (No, don't send me to the 'Big catalog' companies. deep adversion to their products.

I had some of the new MINNESOTA SNOWSWEET apple trees this spring, and some have fruit started, will leave one or two apples per tree. I know i shouldn't, but I have waited a long time for them. Very late spring, I am about halfway between St. Paul, Minnesota and Lake Superior! after last summers extreme drought, am looking forward to a good crop. I am also looking for some GINGER GOLD apple trees.

If you are in the 'northern' climes, I hope you have checked out the Zestar from the U of M. I have had 3 smaller crops from mine, fantastic. I put in some Prarie Magic trees this spring too. Deer, bear, and little old ladies from town do in most of my crop. Can't resist a challenge.

Anyway, after running into fresh Colorado peaches at Gilettte, Wyoming last summer, I am hooked, and want to get some going before it is too late for this old farm boy. Never knew a peach could taste so good. Our pears, plums, and apples are about 2 weeks behind, due to late spring.

so if you can direct me to a grower of good peach and apple stock, thanks. George

Stark's has Intrepid peach, which I have and it is doing fine. I think you can get Contender from Miller Nurseries. They also have good trees.