Peach trees

Anyone here growing peaches? I've got a few trees (and getting more) but the peaches I'm producing are awful small. Tasty and juicy as all get out, but I wish they were just BIGGER. Giving the trees plenty of water, but I honestly haven't fertilized them much.

Any tips I should know about?

I have a half dozen peach trees, Rich. I don't remember which type I got but they were dwarf trees. Do you know what type you purchased? The variety is very zone specific like most of the other trees out there. It doesn't freeze here so my trees are probably much different then most of those in the rest of the country. I have fruit starting on them now and they are always huge but every other year I have a larger crop quantity wise.

I pruned them in January and that is about all I do until the fruit starts to come in then I hit them with extra water every morning. I do dump some of my aged chicken poo/hay mix around them. That's about it.

I will have to see if I can remember what type they were. More than likely a hybridization for this zone. The fruit is a good baseball size.

How old are the trees? That would be my first question.

Things such as pruning and cutting away all the suckers at the bottom need to be done. I use my goats for the suckers. I guess they get some fertilization from that as well. I don't buy fertilizer for anything around here and I don't dump much of the chicken stuff around them.

OK, maybe tennis ball size.

The trees are specific for this area. Gulf King and Gulf Crimson are the varieties, I believe. I have a couple of older June Golds too.

Here's the local place we get them from -> http://www.justfruitsandexotics.com/Peaches.htm

The "Gulf" varieties only require around 400 chill hours, whereas the June Gold needs around 600. It appears the shorter chill hour trees produce fruit much earlier than the longer chill hour varieties. We ate the four peaches that the two year old Gulf King produced already.

Yeah, they are pretty young trees yet, so maybe I'm just being impatient.

Too bad we don't have the reptiles and rodents any longer, as we had a steady supply of fertilizer and compost when we did.

Yeah, BASEBALL sized peaches would be GREAT! But I would settle for tennis ball sized. What I'm getting now is more like golf ball sized....

Last year something got all the peaches that were produced. The night before I felt they were ready to be picked, something took every darn one of them. So this year I need to beat out the varmints....

Originally Posted by WebSlave

The trees are specific for this area. Gulf King and Gulf Crimson are the varieties, I believe. I have a couple of older June Golds too.

Here's the local place we get them from -> http://www.justfruitsandexotics.com/Peaches.htm

The "Gulf" varieties only require around 400 chill hours, whereas the June Gold needs around 600. It appears the shorter chill hour trees produce fruit much earlier than the longer chill hour varieties. We ate the four peaches that the two year old Gulf King produced already.

Yeah, they are pretty young trees yet, so maybe I'm just being impatient.

Too bad we don't have the reptiles and rodents any longer, as we had a steady supply of fertilizer and compost when we did.

Yeah, BASEBALL sized peaches would be GREAT! But I would settle for tennis ball sized. What I'm getting now is more like golf ball sized....

Last year something got all the peaches that were produced. The night before I felt they were ready to be picked, something took every darn one of them. So this year I need to beat out the varmints....

Yeah, if they are two year old trees then I wouldn't have expected anything last year. Matter of fact, I probably would have just thinned them to nothing. The varieties out there are designed to grow faster and faster to produce good fruit right off the back. First year or two, I would be more interested in letting tree put energy into growing than producing.

Also, if you are getting a lot of the golf ball fruit, thin them out well and they will grow bigger. I have problems with birds, also raccoons and possums will get them here as well. The netting works well but it's a hassle in my opinion.
They usually only end up with a small percentage.

Well I think I figured out at least part of the problem. One of the trees we have has never really produced at all. Blooms like crazy every year, but didn't really produce much in the way of fruits. It would get small fruits on it, but they would eventually just fall off. The other would produce some, but not many. Well, we were at a nursery the other day and noticed that they had an ornamental peach out there, saying that it didn't produce fruit. Well, it DID have fruit on it, but they were small and apparently staying green. Just like my one tree. And part of the other. Hmmm... Thinking back, I recalled that this particular peach tree had died back to the ground. I had forgotten about that. So apparently, what I am seeing now is ALL root stock. BTW, the rootstock used around here is to make the trees more resistant to nematodes. Apparently the root stock itself doesn't produce viable fruit.

Anyway, Connie was watering the peach trees and I noticed that the other tree was actually TWO trunks instead of a single central one. Apparently while the trees were neglected (taking care of the animals left little time for this sort of activity), a root stock sucker had grown up and become a full fledged tree next to the REAL producing graft. This rootstock has all small green peaches on it, whereas the graft portion has larger fruits that are blushing out nicely now. So my guess is that in the first mentioned tree, it will NEVER get viable fruits since it is ALL rootstock. Which means the tree will likely get cut down and then dug out. It's not a central trunk anyway and is a bunch of scattered trunks, so that pretty much indicates that they all came from the root stock, I think. Hate to do cut it down as it produces TONS of blooms every year, and is quite pretty. But I can replace it with a tree that also gets pretty flowers AND produces viable fruit.

In the second case, I'm going to cut down the root stock trunk of that tree so the tree puts all of it's resources into growing the graft and the fruit that it produces.

Well, duh.... I guess sometimes you just have to LOOK at things and understand what you are seeing....