MAGNESS FIRST FRUIT BUDS EVER
Mike
22 Likes
Very nice,Mike.Are those crates,that some of your trees are in?
That’s a cool picture. And I imagine the trees were a lot of work!
So sorry Olpea.
1 Like
These are really heavy duty reusable plastic crates in which my next door fast food restaurant gets his chicken parts.
They are about 2 feet square and15 inches deep. As you can see they are not solid walled. I cut out the bottoms and used them as a mini raised bed to a avoid “replant disease”.
This area had 10 cherry and apricot trees that I had to take out. I had to plant in the old holes. I figured that if I, essentially, planted the replacement trees above the old ground, their roots would have a chance to develop, mature and gear up their defenses against the bad biome actors left in the soil from the old trees. By the time the new roots got down to the older soil they would be able to fight those off. The mind experiment seems to have worked in real life.
Mike
3 Likes
As far as I can tell, we didn’t lose any trees. I’ve read that sometimes extreme winter cold will kill the trunk at the base of the tree, but the rest of the tree will still be “alive”. Apparently this results in the peach tree leafing out, because of the energy stored in the wood, followed by a total collapse of the tree. So far, I haven’t seen that yet, but this is a bit uncharted territory for me since I’ve never gone through a winter this cold with peaches.
That’s unusual indeed. Most winters it makes it to at least zero here. I’ve not seen that affect the bloom. Did you happen to notice if your peach trees formed dormant fruit buds? I’m sure you are aware that young peach trees take some age to form fruit buds.
I find this somewhat variety dependent. For example, I have a little Risingstar which is a couple years old, which has several blooms on it, but I’ve also found that Earlystar takes us 4 years before we start seeing blooms.
4 Likes
My Rising Star on a small graft. Should have put it higher on the tree.
Baby Crawford
And Red Baron
All grafted on the same tree with Challenger, Foster, PF25, Spring Snow and Winblo.
16 Likes
Which peach is in the last picture, it is really beautiful. Looks like a quince.
It is called Red Baron. Look like there are Red Baron with double layered flowers like mine and single layered like @Phill_Boise_7a !!
2 Likes
What a beautiful red color. Is the flesh red too?
No a yellow peach.
I have been wondering how your trees fared through the super cold winter Mark. I am glad to hear you have at least a few varieties with blooms!! I am very sorry to hear of all the others that failed to come through with live fruit buds.
I have a Contender graft from 2018 that has about a dozen blooms.
A couple of seedling peaches that haven’t been grafted over have a few blooms, and my *Early Redhaven, Hal-Berta Giant, Sweet Sue and Clayton, have a couple of blooms each. Redskin and Baby Crawford have zero.
Out of my 2020 planting, Contender is the only one with blooms, about a dozen. The others I planted last year were Glenglo, Redhaven, Madison, and Autumn Star.
I have 2 Veteran sitting in the basement, waiting to go in the ground this week. 
I expected Veteran to be at or near the top of your list for those that made it through unscathed. Interesting, especially since they did so well in our late freeze last spring.
3 Likes
.
That’s a pretty neat tree. You need to add a plum to get white flowers on it too.
1 Like
A couple of my persimmons are really advanced and I see the start of flower buds. Hoping the low temps don’t take them away this week.
Saijo— Interestingly, I have another Saijo tree that barely shows any green at all in its buds.
Smith’s Best
Shin Li in petal fall and the fruitlets look promising.
Jilin pear in petal fall. Some of the flowers seem to have survived the freeze earlier in the month and look pollinated. Hopefully, I’ll get to sample it this year.
14 Likes
@Susu,
Thanks. After apricot grafts got my peach trees to grow out of whack, I don’t want to try plums on peach trees. My plan is to only graft nectarines and peaches on the same trees.
3 Likes
Good plan Tippy. It’s hard to keep the lopsided vigor in check.
2 Likes
