And what my poor frost peach looks like now.
Edit since I’m a newbie and can’t post again on this topic: Good eye mamuang! This photo was taken during watering. However, I have very dry rocky soil that dries out almost completely in between weekly watering so I’m afraid to stop watering it. How drought resistant are peaches? I’ve had only about an inch of rain since the beginning of May.
Was that standing water at the base of the tree? Peach does not like wet feet. That waterlog will add to other issues your tree are having. It could be a combo of nitrogen deficiency and a shot hole disease.
Wet feet alone could kill your peach tree.
…this might be more nutrient cycling info than you’re looking for…so there’s soils that do a bad job of grabbing on to nutrients and holding them (that’s where the CEC # on a soil test comes in…let me know if you want the technical definition of CEC… it’s not just saying that it stands for cation exchange capacity) so soils high in sand and gravel (I daylight as a soil scientist and my boss is fond of saying rock’s not a thing…I’ve gotten in the habit of using the appropriate descriptor QED gravel/gravelly, channer, flagstone/flaggy) are poor at holding onto nutrients because of the lower surface volume per cubic inch and because of how lightly weathered they are…and yes a soil can be 100% alluvial or windblown sand and still be considered lightly weathered…
Long story short…and I just did this this year with my own peach, and I have very coarse grained alluvial (sandy gravel) soil…I applied 3 separate doses (low doses) of nitrogen fertilizer over the course of 2 1/2 months…it made a huge difference
I am no expert by any means, I’m just getting started… But my peaches all looked like this several weeks ago and almost completely defoliated. I found it to be a combination of 3 things.
Low soil PH. I probed in 4 places around the feeder roots, with a PH meter that is calibrated. At the normal moisture level my soil PH was 5.6 to 6.2. I watered in powdered barn lime over 2 weeks and increased the soil PH to 6.5 to 7.0. when I say watered in, that’s exactly what I meant, I.made mud around the peach trees.
Low Nitrogen - I fertilized with nitrogen fertilizer as directed. I believe there are numerous options here. Pick one and run with it, always follow label and or directions. For my zone 6B, the last date to fertilize is July 15 so the tips have time to harden before winter. Might be wise to check your zone for last fertilization date.
Lack of fungicide for shot hole - I sprayed the maximum allowed by label Bondie Copper Fungicide for shot hole, it’s all I could find quickly (Rural King). I have since backed off to the minimum allowed by label and frequency. I followed the label to a tee for coverage. I’ve since been alternating sprays between Bondie Copper Fungicide and ferti-lome broad spectrum landscape and Garden Fungicide (CLOROTHALONIL) as per labels. I’m not mixing them together.
My peach trees have recovered and have taken off like a rocket with new dark green tip growth and even some new dark green leafs where they dropped. They took a huge hit because I didn’t check the soil PH, nor fertilize, nor spray during dormancy and pre dormancy, like I should have. I know better now.
Again I’m no expert by any means so take what I said with a grain of salt. But this is how I remedied shot hole (probably better to say controlling) for my peach trees.
I wanted to add… I found all the the things to check in this forum. This forum has tons of great useful information, you just got to dig and get your hands dirty to find what you are looking for 
I’m a geologist so all of that was familiar to me, although soil science describes things slightly differently (we use cobbles>gravel>sand>silt>clay as grain size descriptors). What I have is somewhere between a gravelly sand and a sandy gravel colluvium with minor amounts of silt and organics. The bedrock source of the colluvium in my area has a lot of calcite so my guess is the soil pH should be relatively high. But would be good to check.
Read a bit on CEC and the article I found conflated chemical properties, which it sounds like CEC is actually meant to describe, and porosity / water content. Regardless, it sounds like low CEC soils tend to be coarse grained and lack fines, and need more frequent watering and fertilizing. High CEC soils are high in fines or organics and need slow watering and I guess less frequent fertilizing. Sound about right?
Prior to the fertilizer I applied a couple weeks ago, my peach hadn’t gotten anything since the bone meal I planted it with in May 2022. So hopefully that will help.
Thanks for the discussion, this is great stuff.
Peaches are the hardest of all for me. My peach row is on a old hog and then cattle fence line, that my wife and I tore out and recovered. The 1 1/2 acre lot is where my orchard will be. There is deep layer of organic mass overtop clay loom. I’ve checked clay loom for drainage buy digging a holes and filling it with water, they drained within an hour so that a plus. All the animals a activity has made the soil PH low.
Hope this helps
Sounds like you have a good handle on it.
If you look posts on the forum you’ll find posts on adding wood chips to improve soil…people have had luck with wood chips… there’s also discussion as to how much N the wood chips absorb/how much N to add…the bottom line always seems that there’s ways of improving soil…
Adding mulch is currently problematic in my circumstance. I have moles/voles (not sure which perhaps both?). They find the mulch and seem to want to den under it. The result is girded tree roots and tree death.
I need to work on controlling the moles/voles in the very near future, but haven’t started studying how to yet. So for now, I try to keep under the trees clean of excessive growth by weed whacking and hand pulling weeds. It’s working well for me so far.
Everyone’s circumstances are unique. All we can do is our imperfect best to work with what we have to work with.
I would think anything that adds organics to the soil would be good in most cases. And I like that wood chips help retain moisture at least for the first part of the summer so I chipped all my trees for that reason. But this is not very scientific and I don’t have a “control” tree to compare to.
Someone mentioned elsewhere that peaches have shallow roots and suffer problems with grass pressure. So clearing out weeds and grass around the bases might help.
About moles / voles - do you have any habitat around you for their natural predators? I would imagine things like hawks and owls? Clearing out weeds and grass might help with that as well; less cover for them to hide in.
It’s interesting that your soil conditions are basically the opposite end of the spectrum from mine and we both had problems. Maybe peaches are particularly sensitive. My apple trees look like they’re having a great time.
Same here… apples and pears are doing well, cherries, plums and appricots are doing OK. I.need to work on stone fruits more. From my studying it appears dormant and pre dormant sprays seem to be very important to getting a handle on problems that may flare up during the growing season. So I will be doing those during dormancy, I didn’t do any of that last year.
I only have 7 peaches in one short row. I want to believe it has a lot to do with the soil where I chose to plant the peach row. Right on a very old torn out and reclaimed hog and cattle fence row because it was a good natural marker.
However, increasing the soil PH, fertilizing and spraying fungicides as directed per label —> (more is not better and less is not effective) <— has helped the peach row tremendously.
I still have so much to learn about growing fruit, peaches are by far the most difficult for me. It will be interesting to see how peaches will grow in the new row, I will begin to plant in fall (October/November) time frame. If they do well that that will be even more verification of soil conditions in the original row.
As for mole/vole natural predators. Yes we have a good number of birds of prey but it seems they keep busy mostly on rabbits. I would like it if we had more owls and bats for insects, there’s just a few. The orchard trees are in mow and will continue to be in mow at least that’s the plan.
I hope this conversation has helped you some, it has me. Thanks for taking time to reply
