Great yield on these 5 year old Contender Peaches. Wish I had thinned more, but average peach was larger than a tennis ball - some were almost too large. Unfortunately, the overload broke a few scaffold branches on a couple of trees. Estimate yield at 3-4 Bu/tree.
Zero peaches on most early variety this year, but the Contenders saved my peach season. Contender at 1050 chill hours was bread specifically to reduce loss from heavy frost after early warming period.
Just picked these 18 totes from 2 trees. Macro 9V totes hold about 1/3 bu. Hope to get another bushel or more from each tree on the second picking. I pick directly into these lugs which were developed for cherries.
Nice. Have you measured brix?
Beautiful tree and peaches in the totes. Youâve done well planting âContenderâ. Interested in the brix too.
Dax
Beautiful peaches!!!
Nice looking peaches. I had a lot of Contender peaches last year that were DELICIOUS. My tree this year isnât as productive as last year ( late frost here). Mine will be ripe in about a month. My Redhaven peaches will be ripe in a week or so. I had a few drops Iâve eaten so far. They taste so much better than the store varieties.
Not sure about the brix, I donât own a refractometer so I guess I should buy one. Iâm getting a lot of positive feedback from many customers who return week after week to buy the peaches.
Iâm hearing things like "best peaches I have ever eaten. Iâm pretty sure the peaches I had 2 years ago during the drought were a lot sweeter.
Cool.
Dax
Those look so good, congrats. About how many Contender trees do you have, and will you be getting any later varieties?
I planted a C this spring and itâs done pretty well. But, Iâd think itâll be a couple years before we get any fruit, barring any blossom killing frosts, which seem to be the norm in these parts. After how many years did these trees start producing?
I have 15 Contender trees. My last variety is Flame Prince but I have a short gap between Contender and Flame Prince.
In my area the suggestion is to remove the blooms in year 2 in order to get a bigger crop in year 3. No major frost in year 3 and the average yield was about 1 bu/tree. Lost everything is year 4,
The peaches look great!
Slightly off topic: how do you like the Flame prince? I was considering that peach for my own garden. Do you have any of the other prince series?
Flame Prince is a very good peach in my part of NC. I also have Rubyprince, Fireprince and Sunprince. Had a big problem with split pit on Ruby Prince this year, but we had three 22 degree nights during bloom.
I have about 10 varieties that ripen in sequence over time. I donât see a huge difference between the eating quality of most of the peaches I grow. The important difference is which varieties produce fruit after a big freeze. Also, peaches that ripen after Red Haven seem to produce more fruit than the early varieties like Rich May or Carored even in a good year.
What an awesome looking harvest! Congrats!!!
How many times during the season are you having to spray in order to get those nice blemish free peaches?
Dormant copper and oil, petal fall and a cover spray twice a month.
Iâm finding that Peaches are easier to grow in my area than apples
I donât even see any bird hits on yours! I have a birdbath kinda close, but my bird population must either be thirsty, or theyâre just being jerksâŚ
Not sure if you saw my post, but I got my first Blaze Prince this year and they were outstanding. I have several other Prince varieties that will be 3 and 4 years old next year so hopefully Iâll get to try more. But I love the princes so far, and since they were developed in and for the south, I suspect they might be good for you too.
@blueberrythrill Thanks for posting and talking about your contender peaches. Fruit doesnât get any more perfect than those! Youâve spoiled your customers. They have no idea how hard it is to get a perfect peach like that! 
BTWâŚMy contender trees provided most of the peaches I got this year also- frost killed most others. So they do live up to their expectation on at least some years. Obviously you sprayed some fungicide for Brown Rot, right? THat is my only complaint about contender is they were pretty susceptible. Then again, most peaches are.
Actually the fruit has quite a few defects which do not show in the pictures! Some of the fruit in the lugs will be culled from catfacing, freckles (scab) or insect damage. If the damage is minor we pack it and sell it.
A fungicide is part of the cover spray program and brown rot has not been a huge problem so far. Unfortunately, I have a lot of culled or dropped fruit under the Contender trees which creates a perfect environment for insects or disease and I donât spray when Iâm picking.
Well, trust me, the photos are not hiding THAT muchâŚthose are very nice peaches for most of us. BTWâŚyou said you cull the really bad looking ones. Do you just throw them away? A small orchard near me sells the âuglyâ ones at a pretty significant discount (about 1/3 off). Before I grew peaches I was happy to buy those because I learned early on that as long as you prepared them in a day or so, the âfrecklesâ or deformities (cat-facing), or even bug bites and small bruises didnât hurt them and the savings was significant. But I found it interesting that I was certainly in the minority. Almost no one bought the âuglyâ peaches at the deep discount.
Last year one of the local peach orchards had a contract with Kroger (a grocery store in the mid-south you may know) to provide peaches. When he delivered them they refused to take them because they said they werenât attractive enough. I saw those peaches myself and was amazed that the store wouldnât take them! Its true that they werenât perfect, but honestly they werenât bad AT ALL. The moral to this story is I think most people have come to expect near-perfect looking fruit. Thatâs sad to me. It also suggests to me that organic peaches may be a hard sell in the future since they almost always have imperfections. But maybe the organic crowd understands and accepts that, Iâm not sure?
We used to sell the culls, but we decided that we might cannibalize sales of the good peaches so we quit.
If I had a large freezer we would freeze them and make wine after our season is over.
Great looking tree & peaches!
