Peach trees

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....