Yummy! There is nothing better than eating a ripe peach, still warm from the sun, standing there in the yard with juice dripping down your chin. I can't say I blame you for not being able to wait a couple more days to eat the first one. I am the same way every year with the peaches and plums

Our first plum tree and our peach tree already are bare of fruit, but we're still getting plums off the second tree. This is the earliest we've had fruit ripen/finish up. Usually we are just starting to get plums now, about a week before Father's Day, so we're always picking them right around Father's Day, and the peaches start a week or two after the first tree, and the second plum tree and the wild plum trees are a week or so after the peach tree. Everything is early this year.

Our peach tree is on its last legs and we're going to cut it down now that the fruit is done. We planted two replacement trees for it this year. I let the squirrels have most of the peaches because they were so small. Tim thinned the peaches, but since the fruit ripened a month early, he apparently didn't thin them early enough to get a decent size on the remaining fruit.

We did have to fight the coyotes, deer, squirrels and rabbits (they devour fruit the wind blows off the trees) for every plum, but the birds didn't bother the fruit at all this year. Maybe that's because they're busy with caterpillars and grasshoppers.

You can tell it is stone fruit season here because Wal-Mart is pretty much out of pectin, jars and labels unless you happen to walk in the door just after they've unloaded a truck and restocked the shelves. I know the weather/gardening ups and downs must drive Wal-Mart management crazy. Last year all the stores had huge amounts of pectin, jars, etc. that didn't sell because of the drought. This year the demand is huge, and at least so far, they do not have a steady supply to meet the demand.

So, fruit season's been in full swing here for maybe 3 or 4 weeks now, and cucumber season has hit because the pickling spices are disappearing off the store shelves. It is interesting to watch how it ebbs and flows over the years. Just by watching the supplies on the canning aisle, you can tell when folks are having a good year....or a bad one.

Seeing that you guys already have ripe peaches, I probably better tell you about my peach tree, I think I may have a problem.

It seems like they peaches are not growing, I'd say they're probably about 1.5 inches wide. A lot of them are already starting to get the reddish color and I have been watering it quite a bit, but it doesn't seem like they're gaining any size. Maybe I need to add some kind of a plant food? The last year we had peaches, they had the same problem, they ripened at a very small size, but I can't remember what month they ripened. It's an Elbert dwarf peach tree and it is loaded with peaches (maybe there are too many)? I lay the hose down at the trunk and let it run for quite awhile about every other day.

I'm also getting some scaley looking stuff on some of the peaches. I saw what I believe to be a wheel bug on it the other day so I left it thinking that might help, my understanding it the scaley stuff is some kind of insect damage, but I haven't seen any other that then wheel bug. Unless it's not a wheel bug, it was gray and looked similar to a praying mantis? The pics I found kind of resemble the wheel bug unless you guys have any other ideas? Thanks for any ideas.

I'm certainly not a peach expert, but I wonder if perhaps there are too many. Dawn said one of her peaches produced small peaches because it wasn't thinned enough. Our peaches are smallish, because we didn't thin aggressively enough early enough.

Don't know anything about the scaly stuff. Our problem for years has been brown rot, but the Neem spray seems to have almost completely eliminated that, as well as discouraged the Japanese Beetles which hung on the fruit by the hundreds last year.

Sheri,

Did you thin the peaches? We always thin the peaches and plums so that there's several inches between fruit. Otherwise they stay really small. I think we thinned the peaches too late this year, but we did a really great thinning job on the plums, although severe thunderstorms then came along a few weeks later and thinned them out a whole lot more.

At this stage, there's not much you can do to make the fruit larger. Fertilizer won't help them this late in the game in terms of this year's fruit size.

I think Dorothy's right that the scaley stuff you're seeing is brown rot, which is a fungal disease. It is common on stone fruit. My plants have it about once every 4 or 5 years.

Dawn

Mulberryknob,

That's what I was wondering about. It doesn't take an expert to give the right advise! Thanks for the neem oil info too, I've used it in the past on my garden when the heat was too excessive to get rid of various pests.

Dawn,

Ok, I'll bet it is brown rot then. Well very discouraging news about the size because their isn't much to them and they do look like they are rapidly ripening. When should you thin? My tree is loaded, unfortunately, I was thinking the more the merrier, and as the limbs have slowly sunk to the ground I've been thinking oh no! Not looking too good.

I meant I used the neem oil--when the heat was NOT too excessive. Sorry!

Sheri, the time to thin is shortly after fruit set. When the fruit is solidly set but before the tree has expended too much energy growing them out. We didn't thin early enough on either peaches or apples and had to go back and pull off half grown fruit. That's a waste of water and tree energy. And still have two broken branches on the peach tree from too much weight.