Mine is in now! Yeah! I wish I would have bought it earlier to see what that Arctic Glo Nectarine was, with some sugar spots.Man even under ripe fruit was great!
Hey your deflating my ego with the first 5 years no rot thing. Oh well, it might as well hop on with all the other pests. SWD found my yard this year! Major bummer, oh well, not sure what I’ll do about it yet?
Lizzy, thats a very unusual peach and I have seen nothing like it. Maybe someone at your local CRFG will know more about it.
Right now my Late Crawfords are coming in. This peach just keeps getting better every year, and the fruit also keeps getting bigger - this year some are as large as any other peach I have. It has a very rich and unique flavor, I would say its better than any of the other Crawford types I have except Foster. It has a flavor of deep spices in the background, clove or similar. Here is what Peaches of New York says about it:
Late Crawford is at the head of the Crawford family, long dominant among the several groups of American peaches and not yet equalled by any other yellow-fleshed peaches in quality. Late Crawford, a quarter-century ago, began to give way to Elberta because of the greater productiveness of the Elberta tree and the showier Elberta fruits and now, though widely distributed, is nowhere largely planted and seems destined to pass out of cultivation as a peach of commerce. Unproductiveness and tardiness in coming in bearing are the faults on account of which Late Crawford is failing.
I would agree it is somewhat unproductive, and it certainly takes a long time to get going … I almost pulled it out because it didn’t fruit at all for several years and the fruits were nothing special at all for the first few years of fruiting.
I finally went ahead and picked most of the remaining Carolina Golds. I really need to thin better- I think it would reduce the variability. Some are extremely tasty (15-16), while there are others I just toss after taking a bite (7-8 brix). I’d far prefer 1/3 as much if it was uniformly top quality and bigger.
The blackberries are a nice surprise, which I found today when pruning. They are Triple Crown, which is almost shockingly late for them. It seems that all the winter die-back I had spread out the crop.
Bob, I don’t remember how old your tree is but Carolina Gold is a variety that took several years to get going for me. I had it on deck to rip out, but this year it was very good. I don’t think it will ever be a high sugar fruit but it still has good flavor.
This is year #4 for me (2 peaches in year #2, ~25 in year #3, and lots this year in #4). The quality was actually better the first two years. Most of my measurements from those years were in the 13-18 range. I even had one outlier last year, which measured 22.5 after a couple weeks in the fridge. So I think that I can avoid some of the quality issues and near collapse of the tree by doing a better job thinning.
Even after I’ve picked most of the peaches, the tree is pretty splayed out. Maybe I need to tie it back up to let it heal into shape.
Carolina Gold was designed to bloom very late to avoid crop losses due to a heavy frost/freeze after the warm spells that occur frequently in NC. Because of the late bloom period, very little natural thinning from frost will take place and very heavy hand thinning will be required to keep the fruit load from splitting the tree into pieces. Contender and Winblo (from NCSU) also set fruit very heavily. Even after a 23 degree night during bloom, these trees still managed to produce a much better than expected crop size on my three year old trees. I thought I thinned them heavily the first time, but as the peaches got larger I had to thin a couple more times. I’m not sure how they rank on the brix scale, but they will produce a full crop in almost all years.
Bob your growing skills are amazing. Will there be enough sugar and good peach taste to at least turn them into jam? You get more out of a half acre of land than anyone I know. How great!
I bet these peaches would make an excellent jam.
You add so much sugar to jam, IMHO sugar level is best if low! I myself use as little sugar as possible in jam. I like jams that taste like fruit, not corn syrup.
If a fruit is low in sugar adding more will not hurt at all and is easily done. Besides using a calcium gelling agent (you only need 1/2 cup of sugar), with pectin I found you can get a gel with low sugar pectin with a 2 to 1 ratio of fruit to sugar. I usually make 5 cup batches (prepped and ready for processing, not raw fruit) and use 2.5 cups of sugar.
Yeah my Arctic Glo was so good, it would make a killer jam, but it’s way too good eating fresh to use for jam. I would not have a problem ripping out all of my peach and nectarine trees and putting in Arctic Glo, yeah it was that good.
Drew, I had an Arctic Jay which I loved but lost to borers. Not only was the taste wonderful and sweet, the color of the fruit was beautiful. I have more room for more trees but I’m working on my pear tree additions this year. I’m in the same mind to use little ‘cane’ sugar. I love relying on the sugar in any fruit. Isn’t it the best?
Yes, and arctic jay is a high acid fruit btw, most of these red fleshed types are too, they probably all have high sugar too. We know Jay and Indian free do.
I want an Arctic Jay too as only Jay and Glo have high acid in that series. In 2017 I think the patent expires. I’m going to wait and request scion if I can find it?
For me these high acid/high sugar fruits are ideal for my tastes. I need to concentrate on them.
Drew, my Arctic Jay was fairly white with a tinge of pink. I loved the acid it in. The tree was four years old. Cried while I sawed.
Actually, it is my lack of skills (by not forcing myself to thin enough) which produced the problem. But I’m working on it 
It is mostly the smaller ones which have the low brix, so I’ve been giving out the bigger ones. Some of the small ones are tasty though, so I don’t toss them away. If I’m cutting them up for my wife, then I just give her them all- she cares more about it being juicy (Asian pears and watermelon are her favorites and she isn’t fond of apples) than about the sugar level.
With the large amount of grapes I made into jelly recently, I think I’ve got enough without making more out of peaches. I boiled down 25 lbs of the seeded grapes myself, most of which is now jelly (we drank some as juice) and I gave a lot away. But now that you mention it, it is tempting.
I picked up an Arctic Jay this year.There should be a fair amount of scion wood by 2017. Brady
The problem would then be the length of the season. Having a ton is a good way to get some past the animals (though not a certainty, based on some horror stories), but it doesn’t stretch the whole summer. But Arctic Glo sounds like a good one to add.
Reading through the last few comments is tempting me to make some jam…I’ve been using a new Cucina Pro Maslin (something that @mrsg47 and @scottfsmith suggested in another thread) and it has made things a lot easier. It is possible with a normal pan, but this has virtually eliminated the times when it boils over (more even boiling), which greatly reduces cleanup. Best jamming buy ever- it was $27 on Amazon for a 9.5 quart pan.
I didn’t use any pectin at all for the grape jelly- I just used some white and red currants. It didn’t take many- probably about 1/10th or less of the total fruit. I only used 4 lbs of sugar in the last batch of grapes (original weight around 10lbs, cooked down to ~0.6 gal). But, I do like my jams and jellies on the slightly runny side (roughly in between holding it’s shape and running like pancake syrup).
@Drew51, you’ve probably said this somewhere else, but what other types of peaches and nectarines do you have?
Good idea about the currants for pectin! I use low sugar because you bring to a rolling boil, then add sugar and bring back to a rolling boil, boil for one minute and you should have a gel at this point. So basically less than 2 minutes of boiling. The more you cook, the more complex molecules are broken down (such as vitamins). So the less one cooks the better.
@bradybb Thanks Brady, sounds like a plan!
SMC I have pf Lucky 13 (just OK not great)
Spice Zee nectaplum (good but so are many others)
Indian Free (OK, i would for sure keep this one!)
This winter I’m going to ask for Redhaven, O’Henry, Winblo, Old Mixon, scion.
I plan to graft to Lucky 13 and the Nectaplum. I will keep one scaffold of original trees. So what Bob says about
spreading out the harvest is what i want to do. Although taste and what works here comes first. Clayton and Redskin are others I have interest in too. Many others too, I just have to choose wisely. So many good cultivars. Clayton and Winblo might not work well here though? About removing all trees was more a dramatic statement to say it’s a great cultivar. I would not remove them in reality.
Drew you should also try Tasty Rich and Goldust peaches, along with Silver Gem nect, of course. That would fill your pre-Redhaven season with awesome fruit.
Awesome, thanks! I’m really weak on the pre-Redhaven choices!
Bob,
How do you make grapes jelly? I have a bagful of concord that my brother harvest a bit early so it’s a bit small and on a sour note. No one in my family want to eat them. Throwing them away is not in my DNA but eating sour fruit is not my favorite thing either! What to do but to make jelly?
Tom
