Well, I finally saw the questions from back in April! No Spice-Zee is not "just a really good nectarine", it is like a white nectarine with a definite plum flavor. However, it is a peach leaf curl magnet, so I think if you have disease in your climate, it would be a lot of work to keep the tree healthy. If not, definitely get one! I have heard Sprite/Delight are not very good, the taste practically for the birds, maybe they would be OK for pies. But there are so many trees much more worth the space I can't see growing either. And my Cot-n-Candy is a growing FIEND, it sprouts branches all over like it is a bush and sets fruit really heavy every year. The trunk hit 6 inches in diameter in 3 or 4 years. So it is just a fabulous variety, if you can grow apricots. Carla in Sac

I thought the tree is already to be replaced as the discussion ensued, if so, what cultivars would be better, given the history. Tomcot would be the best suited, based on Don Yellman's excellent advice. Harcot would also be nice, but recalling that the place is around the Bay Area, it would not get enough chilling hours in most years. We are 12 miles west of the Sacramento Capitol as the crow flies. In our area a couple of years ago, during prolonged low intensity rains around bloom time, there were severe brown rot, blossom blight on apricots. Peaches also got the blight and rot aside from peach leaf curl. Fruit sets were generally poor. During those times, Tomcot, Goldkist, Royal Rosa, Harcot apricots fruited adequately without needing to thin out (that means just adequate fruits). Last year, we had relatively very dry spell during the bloom, and almost all stone fruits whose diseases did not get deeper into the tree, they have limb breaking yields. Those are a few observations from around the neighborhood who seldom spray their trees. Oftentimes, it is useless to spray your trees in an urban setting, because of the neighbors. And even if you did get their permissions, not everyone will spray at the same time. So you will always have a reservoir of diseases and their vectors. Often hobbyists have a plethora of cultivars in close proximity of each other and not big blocks of monocultured trees. Planting distances of trees are designed for machineries to pass through in commercial orchards and these spacings are never applicable for a city backyard in prime costing land. Commercial growers and home hobbyists have different objectives in raising fruit trees or plants in general and have dramatically different environments in which they operate. I take the observations and experimentations of hobbyists and home growers with proper context and value them much better than the standard methods meant for commercial growers. One has to consider these primary differences when discussing various issues.

Glenn, I just pruned my Braeburn apple tree today. I have some scion wood if you want it. This apple is a late bloomer so you will need another late blooming variety for pollination. On the plus side it does really well in our hot summers. I would recommend Fuji, Pink Lady or Granny Smith as possible other cultivars to pollinate it with. I can say definitively that this Braeburn tree bloomed in late spring and has already set some small fruitlets.

Jessaka, More people "love their fruit trees to death" by overwatering and overfeeding them than kill them by neglecting them. I hardly ever water my yard or trees, and I never fertilize them, because all that does is push them into unnaturally fast growth. I want them to grow at the natural rate that corresponds to the actual rain that falls (or doesn't fall) from the sky. I know that, if all our native trees can survive, grow and produce fruit based on nothing but rainfall (we have lots of native fruit trees in our acres of woodland and semi-woodland), then so can the fruit trees I've planted near the house. That's just my own personal philosophy, though, but it is based on a lifetime of growing fruit trees and observing two things: (1) in rainier years, fruit trees have more insect problems and more disease issues, and (2) in rainier years, the fruit are larger but the flavor is watered down. Also, trees that get more moisture (whether rainfall or irrigation) carry heavier loads of fruit AND foliage, and limb breakage is more common. In a rainier year, it seems like limb breakage (even on properly pruned trees) is much worse than it is in drier years. So, my trees get only rainfall or perhaps an inch or two of rain per month in drought periods when there is no rain at all and they never give me trouble. I read somewhere once that peach and apricot trees grow best in a couple of feet of sandy soil on top of clay. In that type of soil conditions, they have the good drainage provided by the sandy soil and they have good deep soil moisture in the clay beneath the sand. I choose the planting location for our trees based on that....they are in the sandiest soil I have and that band of sandy soil lies on top of thick, red Oklahoma clay, and so far it has worked out really well. It has worked out so well, in fact, that I wish our band of sandier soil were wider so I could plant more fruit trees there. We have some neighbors a couple of miles up the road who have about 6 or 8 fruit trees (judging from their size, they are semi-dwarfs) planted by the previous homeowners. These trees are so far from the house and water faucet, that I don't think you COULD water them, unless you have a couple of hundred feet of water hose, or carry water to them in buckets. They only get natural rainfall, therefore, and have been covered in fruit this year, having somehow survived the late freezes and heavy winds. (They are in a pretty sheltered low-lying area with lots of trees and buildings around.) These are trees that get no special attention and still produce a crop that surprised even me, because the trees weren't looking good at all when I saw them in mid-July, but they had plenty of peaches, including some very yummy white-fleshed ones. So, sometimes I think that the less we interfere with Mother Nature, the better. The first year or two that we lived here, there was a drought and I watered WAY too much, trying to make up for the drought and for the fact that I hadn't improved the soil "enough" yet. (And I KNEW I was watering too much, but was afraid everything would die if I stopped.) I did have greener, lusher foliage but also had every disease and pest issue in the book, so I completely stopped fertilizing and cut the watering back to no more than 1" of water per week, and all the disease and pest issues vanished. So, less water and only natural compost/mulch as fertilizer gives me a less perfect-looking landscape but also less diseases and few pests. I don't know if watering less would solve all the problems you've had with your fruit trees or not, but it did for me. And, of course, you cannot control the amount of rainfall your plants receive. When I lived in Fort Worth, I probably overfertilized and overwatered our landscape too much, but I had lovely, lush St. Augustine grass and I liked keeping it thick and gorgeous. Here, though, I've learned that less is more, and in the times we live in with lots of water rationing, it is probably better to underwater than to overwater. That's just me and my experiences, though, and no one else has to become a "minimalist" at watering just because I prefer it, but it works here for me in our soil and our climate. Dawn