SATURN PEACHES ZONE 5B PURLING, NY
Mike
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Great looking Saturn peaches. I hope they taste as good as they look.
I love Saturn, a sweet, white-flesh donut peach.
So do squirrels, birds, wasps and rot. I’m harvesting the Tang0’s the squirrels left me before I eliminated them. It is my favorite saucer peach, but they are all a PIA here except on drought years. More than half of mine have split pits even after thinning for split pits- these rot as they ripen no matter what you put on their skin. The few sound ones are both huge and delicious. Maybe they’d split less if I grew them to be smaller and left more on the tree. Still, I have more than I can use myself.
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My Tang O’s are stll small but, so far, unscathed. But with these last 2 weeks of rain and another on the way… let’s just say, I sent an extra couple of bucks to St. Jude’s children’s Hospital envelope.
My Saturn tree is prolific as heck.
Below is a photo of the SIXTH bowl I harvested and there are at least two more on the tree. And I thinned vigorously…(500+fruitlets off) or so I thought.
The bowl is 20 inches accross
Mike
8 Likes
Now I know why these are $5-7.00 a lb. in the stores.
They are so fragile and hard to harvest. They grow so close and tight to the branch that 90% of those you see were harvestwd using a small bonsai snips/scissors.
Very time consumingly labor intensive. I am embarrassed to say how many had the skin separated and pulled off because I accidentally tugged a weee bit to much in trying to get the snips in.
Mike
1 Like
So nice and clean. Quite diiferent from @alan’s has experienced.
My area is in the middle of another 5 days of continuous rain. Mine have not ripen yet. They could just rot with so much rain this past several weeks.
Totally agree with how clingy they are to branches and how difficult to thin and pick them.
We just got through with Saturn. Strangely, I’ve never had a rot issue with them. Not like TangOs, which we are picking the last of. The skin on TangOs I inks badly.
The biggest issue by far of Saturn is it’s stem pick damage. I’ve tried everything to get them off the trees in a fairly reasonable amount of time without the stem tears. The best is to just let them get dead ripe.
Stem pick damage was so bad on Saturn this year, I just let customers pick their own and told them to expect the stem tears. Once they know it’s just a cosmetic issue, most customers were OK with it, when they picked it themselves.
TangOs are another issue. On wet years the inking (and rot) can be considerable. We also thinned off all the split fruit and thinned them really late. My idea was the late thinning would reduce the sized of the fruit, plus it would allow more time for the splits to show up and be thinned off. I think it helped this year.
This is the basket I just delivered to my mom.
First harvest of the year: peaches, nects, plums.
She’s 92 and sharp as a tack. There I was so proud, but, with a wink, she took some credit because she said that she is getting this because… " I knew it was a good idea to start having you take care of my tomatos when you were six"
Mike
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