HI J, I have 3 peach trees. All have fruited in 2-3 years. I did not really amend the soil except for adding some top soil to fill the holes because I did not have enough native soil to put back. In my areas, rocks grow best. Rocks and boulders are everywhere when you dig a hole. I've fertilized the tree a bit in the spring each of the following years. I don't want to fertilize too much. If I were you, I'd get rid of competing weed around each tree and mulch it. Your apple tree looks stunted. A 3 yrs old apple tree should not look like that even in your type of soil. Not sure why, but you may want to consider relocating it. The soil in my yard is also land fill. The trees still grow decently. As for apple fruiting, I have apple trees that have fruited in 2nd and 3rd year on semi-dwarf rootstocks. My Honey Crisp is on an unknown rootstock. It must be at least 6 years old now but still have not fruited. My guess is it's on a standard rootstock which will take much longer. Make sure you have another variety of apple that blooms about the same time to cross pollinate. If there are crab apple trees in your neighborhood, you'd be all set.

The age was a "guess-timate". The tree was planted 3 falls ago. The lower trunk is 4 1/2 inch diameter. Around 1 1/2 foot from the bottom it all branches out so that biggest limb is 2" diameter. Got it at a big box store super cheap, so like you said no big financial loss. I do hate to kill a plant, though, even an unwanted one!! Went to Hilton Head a few summers back and got all inspired by their "a tree every few feet" philosophy. Well, that's an exaggeration but not much of one. Never saw so many trees near the beach in my life, probably more than when the indians lived there LOL!! Sue

The terms do not mean what you are probably thinking. "Blooms on old wood" applies to hydrangeas like Mopheads and Oakleaf hydrangeas- hydrangeas of these types produce invisible flower buds on last year's growth (around July-August-September) and these open in the Spring. Last year's growth is what is meant by "old wood". If my old-wood mophead develops a new stem this Spring, I would not expect bloomage from it until Spring 2016. "Blooms on new wood" applies to hydrangeas like Limelight and Annabelle- hydrangeas of these two types produce invisible flower buds this year (around May-July) and these invisible flower buds then open as soon as they are ready (in a month+ or so maybe? meaning you are not waiting all winter long for example). The stems that produce blooms may be brand new ones from this year. Or they could be stems from last year that leafed out this year. New stems, by the way, will not be as strong and as older ones. They will not support big heavy blooms as well so, you could see new stems with large blooms bending. Older stems get stronger as time passes and can support bigr/heavy blooms better.

Yes. In my area, winter was mild. Temps crashed suddenly to 19 around Jan 5-7. Maybe you got this drop too at about the same time. I am sure they broke dormancy here as we had temps in the 80s before that... but I completely missed the weather warnings back then. I had the winter protection chicken wire ready to be used in the garage and bags of mulch. But I was not monitoring the weather as well as I should have. Out of practice maybe. I rarely need to use winter protection and this event sneaked under my radar. Still, a few shrubs in "protected" locations bloomed. Worst affected was the north facing shrubs. Oakleafs and serratas were hardly affected. I suggest trying winter protection (I use chicken wire filled with mulch). You can remove this about two weeks after your avge date of last frost. Paniculatas typically do not have this problem. Neither does Annabelle and its cousins. But I am noticing no blooms from them yet and am suspecting -quite oddly- winter issues with those too.