Olpea, that sounds like a great tree to me – harvesting a ton of peaches from it, what more can you ask? I have many trees that are mistakes based on the standard pruning guidance but are making a ton of great fruit. One of my peach trees has no scaffolds until around 6’ - I had backup budded a variety high but then needed to convert the tree to that variety. I just bent down the high limbs and its looking to be a nice tree.
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Incredible looking trees and pruning! How old are your peach trees? They look like a similar caliper to mine which are going into their 6th growing season in Zone 5A.
Olpea thank you so much. You can never have enough peaches or raspberries! The tree is beautiful. My trees are planted quite close together so that width which I know is right only gets to about six feet wide in my orchardar. Most of my trunks are about three feet high only. One is shorter (the peach I will be grafting this early summer). Thank you for taking the time for such fantastic photographs.
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Maine, we planted around the same time. Most are going into the 6th season, some 5th, some 4th.
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Awesome tree. I also can’t leave that much on my peach trees if they set like last year even thinning 6-8". I wish I had the nerve to try spraying thinner, but I haven’t had enough success yet to lose a crop based on screwing up. It will be another year of manual thinning. Maybe next year…
So I’ve read that peaches set fruit on 1 year old wood. Does that mean they DO NOT set fruit on wood that is 2 years old or greater? If thats the case it definitely seems like peach pruning would require to most agressive wood removal each year just to keep them in check.
I’ve heard apricots fruit on second year wood. What about plums/pluots, apples, and pears?
This picture was taken couple weeks back before pruning. It was pruned hard after that but I retained the scaffold structure.
This is my Saturn peach in its 3rd year. The 1st year as bare root but died out almost completely except a little branch sprouted above the grafted joint. I let it grow undisturbed. The 2nd year, it branched out and I tied down branches for scaffolds. I also got 2 out of 3 flat peaches out of it!
I think I have an unconventional scaffolds with branches from the main trunk, bent to the side and the secondary served as is now.
Do you have similar tree with this kind of scaffold arrangement? I just wonder if this is strong enough when it finally matures. Notice how low the “scaffolds” that it has? And the little bump on the right of the grafted union where the original main trunk was?
Tom
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Yes peaches set on last yrs wood. And they don’t have spurs like many stone fruit. But there are smaller branches on the older wood that function like spurs, ie flower and fruit.
Apricots, pluots, plums, and even sweet cherries fruit on both spurs on older wood and last yrs wood. The spurs on apricot usually only last 2-4 yrs. Pluot and plum spurs last longer. Sweet cherry spurs last many yrs if they have good light.
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Tom,
Your tree looks fine to me. Ideally, it’s nice to have a little more vertical space b/t scaffolds, and to have scaffolds a bit smaller in diameter relative to the trunk size, but peaches seem to rarely offer the ideal.
Olpea,
It’s exactly the vertical spacing of these 3 “scaffolds” that make me worry that once matured, it would be easily split if there were a heavy fruit set thus destroying many years of works!
I guess I’ll be propping the branches up if it ever shows sign of heavy load later…
Tom
Tom,
You are exactly right in your assessment. Peach trees are more prone to split than other trees I grow.
I’ve got several mature peach trees right now which have started to split. I hate to lose trees. The good news is new peach trees are fairly quick to come into production. Commercial guidelines say expect to lose 5% per year, which covers splits.
I think peach trees are sort of a hybrid b/t annual crops and trees. Their growth patterns are more like annual weeds, but they take a few years to get into production.
It was pruned to chest high. There’re still plenty of flower buds all over the branches.Hopefully some will survive this week freeze, 23-24 degree forecast for up coming Thursday!
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Tom,
Your Saturn got a very nice hair cut just the way I like it. Pedestrian harvest.
Tony
Here is a picture of the trees in full bloom taken last week.
Since I pruned hard, I’m hoping for no major freeze.
This is year 4 on the trees and I’m hoping for 2 bushels a tree, about twice what I got last year
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That’s a nice bloom and great looking trees. Hope it goes well from here!
Very nice Blueberry. Beautiful blossoms. What variety is it?
Beautiful~ and so well pruned!
My wife took the picture so I’m not 100% sure about the variety. It looks like the last row which is Flame Prince
Rain scheduled for tomorrow, so I’m putting fertilizer out today. I’m going to increase my rate from the 2 cups/tree I used last year to 3 cups/tree this year and see if I can improve the size of the peaches. That’s about 30 oz 17/17/17 per tree, but less than the recommendation for my area for 4 year old trees.
I love this time of the year - everything looks perfect and expectations for the coming season are sky high!
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This is an Elberta peach that I pruned to chest height. The scaffold is none existence but only one branch to the left. I grafted a Mormon apricot last year to its trunk (to the right of the trunk) and it grew to over 5 feet. This year, I pruned it back to build up the new scaffold.
Today, I checked on it and see tiny leave buds barely swollen up. Hopefully it turns out decent!
