Hello,
I’m new to this forum. I’d like to thank you for your evaluation. It is near impossible to find this sort of information from anyone that has grown the tree. Last year, I purchased a farm with 1,500, 6-12 year old peach tress. It was a tough year. We had a very poor harvest for every variety except Contender and Carolina Gold.
In hopes that it was the 15 degree spring weather, the lack of experience, and the necessary corrective pruning, we just ordered 600 more trees. Unfortunately, that order includes 43 PF27A and 127 Victoria. The goal was varieties with bud hardiness similar to Contender and hours were spent researching varieties. Unfortunately, it seems the goal may not have been met. Based on your post, perhaps PF 35-007 is worth locating.
Contender seems like such an excellent tree for it’s window and can be purchased for $500 per 100. Do you think PF24C is worth the extra $10 per tree? Will you please share where you found the 35-007?
The most challenging window to fill was Red Haven +7 and +35-45. Has anyone here had experience with the PF 28-007 or any other variety that does well in challenging years and ripens during the window Red Haven +7 or +35-45?.
I put this list together from one of your earlier posts. It was intended to filter out the marginal varieties keeping only the most productive, disease tolerant, and best flavored. Now I can update with current info in this thread.
I wouldn’t sweat that decision too much. PF27A produces poorly in bad weather years, but we’ve still harvested a lot of peaches off these trees.
Likewise Victoria produces poorly in frosty springs, but I’ve not found anything this late which produces good quality peaches, so I don’t plan to remove this variety.
It’s definitely worth planting in marginal peach areas. I bought them from Adams County. But Boyer’s nursery also sells them. Boyer’s is expensive, but if you buy large quantities of trees, they are very reasonable. And they don’t sell out nearly as early as Adams.
Contender is the most bullet proof tree we’ve grown in terms of production. 24C is really good too, but if you are satisfied with Contender, I’d stick with that, unless you want a peach a few days later.
Don’t order 28-007 if you want production in marginal years. It was terribly finicky for me. I wouldn’t plant that one again, even if someone gave the trees to me.
It sounds like you and I face similar challenges in peach production. Namely frosty springs.
We didn’t have the best spring weather in 2022 but still have full production. I credit that to leaving a lot of red wood on the trees in the previous fall, and not pruning in late fall or winter.
It left us with a huge chore of trying to get all the trees pruned in the spring when there are a million other chores to do, but it did help with peach production.
Next year I lose my experienced pruner, so we will be pruning in late fall and possibly in winter, and leaving much less red wood on the trees, so necessarily don’t expect a full crop next year. But labor is driving the situation.
Btw, you may be interested in 2020 peach evaluations. That year we had two days were all the peaches were in full bloom, and it never got above 30F. Even in the daytime it hovered around 30F. All the blooms were covered in ice, which isn’t automatically a killer, but it’s not good.
Thanks for consolidating that list Fusion. I would offer that even though Spring Snow, Glenglo and Blazingstar are all excellent quality peaches, as grown here, all of them are not necessarily productive. I’d rate Glenglo the most consistently productive of the three, but it’s not nearly as consistently productive as Risingstar.
We have grown a couple acres of peach trees in central NC and have spent some time with other growers, peach breeders and specialist in NC. I’m zone 7B but used to be 7A at about 800 feet elevation.
Contender was bred specifically to tolerate frost damage after a lot of the NC Peach industry was just about wiped out by several severe frosts. Very high chill hours is the most important factor for frost survival in my area based on what I was told. Prune as late as possible helps too. 1500 trees is a lot to prune!
Contender is around 1050 Chill Hours. I believe Carolina Gold is around 1050 too. Red Haven is around 900 if my memory is correct. It does well here with frost but not as well as Contender. I have no experience with any of the PF varieties but not many varieties have CH over 1000.
I bet Vaughn Nursery in Tennessee would be a good source of advice for varieties to fill your window in your 7A climate with some frost tolerance. Also I attached an old NCSU publication for varieties favored by a large grower in the Sandhills area. I noticed another NCSU high chill hour peach, Challenger is close to the Red Haven window.
My area is definitely marginal. There is almost always a frost in April. Thanks, for posting a link to the 2020 review. I read you post about Tiana and one about a flat peach as well. Unfortunately, my order includes Tiana, Messina, Selena, and Desiree. Forgive me if I am remembering wrong or have misinterpreted your posts, but it seems you liked Victoria at first but then had some issues selling the fruit. Looking at it in hindsight, would you plant Victoria or plant more PF 35-007, refrigerate the fruit, and let the season close once the cooler is empty?
As for pruning, the prior owner’s health was failing leaving the trees unpruned that year. Supposedly it was only 1 year. Then in Feb. 2021 the family hired a former farm hand that pruned the trees. He cut many limbs 2-3 in diameter. Unfortunately, no one removed the limbs from the trees so that was our first task in July of 2021. The trees were still so big you couldn’t fit a tractor down the rows . In January of 2022 I hired a former head at my orchard to prune the trees. It seemed we could fill a semi trailer with what he cut off each row of 40 trees. I would push the sticks with a 4 wd 70 hp tractor. By the end of the row, it was all the tractor could do to move the pile. So, maybe I have good trees and they were just pruned heavily 2 years in a row.
Based on the posts here, it seems the Rutgers varieties may be better fit for a commercial canning operation than the fresh market. I’m thinking of cancelling them. I like the idea of growing the best tasting peaches all year. Unfortunately, the best tasting are not consistent cropping and it’s hard to build a customer base frequently having a small harvest. When the fruit finally does come, the business structure can only handle a fraction and the rest falls to the ground.
That’s what happened to us this year. Our harvest was very poor up until contender started ripening. Then we had many peaches to sell but all the good farmers markets already had peach vendors. If we had local peaches at the beginning of the season we could’ve gotten in at several markets. I want to grow the best peaches that we can count on in the tough years. Of course, we’ll plant a few of the best tasting peaches for those special people but for the rest of the market tree ripened Contender and Carolina Gold is better than anything else available. Honestly, I did not see another vendor selling any tree ripened peaches. Even those that I know grow peaches sell unripe blemished peaches that I’d have a hard time associating with my name.
As far as marketing, we learned a hard lesson, don’t assume farmers markets allow only local farmers and don’t assume you’ll get a spot because you are local. Many market vendors sell the same peaches you could buy at Kroger for 0.96/lb. At the farmers market they feed off the assumption that the fruit is better so buyers pay about 3.50/lb. There’s a multimillion dollar business based on that exact business model. They buy peaches harvested unripe, put them in a pretty box, and sell them at all the local markets. Somehow, their marketing have convinced buyers it better than Kroger. The fruit is so hard it comes with “ripening” instructions. I had large, blemish free, perfectly tree ripened Flame Prince peaches at markets where buyers would pass up my fruit and pay more for baseball sized blemished rock hard peaches hidden in a paper sack. That’s the power of marketing. You can’t afford to build a brand selling excellent fruit once every five years. They built a brand consistently selling garbage in a sack. Imagine what a grower can do selling the excellent fruit consistently. The first step is planting trees that produce fruit every year.
Thanks for the document and suggestion. I’ve called Vaughn nursery and gotten some recommendations. It seems there aren’t many trees as hardy as contender and Carolina Gold. Based on the posts here, PF 24c and PF 35-007 could fill out 3-4 weeks but none of the PF varieties are available at Vaughn.
I have 60 challenger trees. This year, they had 5-25 peaches per tree. I tried leaving them and learned a valuable lesson. It’s hard to care for so little. The bugs, squirrels, deer, raccoons, and birds are going to take 10 per tree. Then once there is so little fruit it’s a complete waste of time the fruit is left to fall. Then it serves as a safe harbor for the bugs. There’s nothing like seeing 100 June bugs on one peach and then seeing them fly off to go ruin 100 more peaches.
Here’s a photo of a fruit on a tree on a very low yield area that was not being sprayed. Next time, I’ll pull off all the fruit in areas with very low yields.
Thanks for posting the link. The descriptions make the peaches sound absolutely perfect. They bud late, are cold hardy, the fruit can hang for long periods, the fruit stores well, the fruit is large, and it taste excellent. The one exception is that the earliest variety isn’t the best peach but it’s the best early peach. If the descriptions were half true those varieties would be easy to locate. My experience has been that they are hard to locate and not one of the nurseries is willing to attest that the few varieties offered perform anywhere near the level PF claims. You’d think many nurseries would offer every variety or at least a complete series. PF’s own website doesn’t even have a description of all the varieties. I don’t see anything concerning 27A.
The nurseries not having fields full of these trees lead to me seek out growers with experience. I would love to hear from anyone here with experience that differs from the postings in this thread. So far, I’ve only seen positive feedback for 9A and 35-007.
Welcome to this site. Lots of friendly people and helpful information to be picked up on.
I have one 35-007 peach trees. This year was horrible for peaches here in SW Ohio. Late frost/freeze just at the time of the blooms coming out. I did get a few peaches off that tree. They were misshaped because of the frost/freeze and constant rain so spraying was impossible to do. I was impressed with the ones I could taste. I look forward to tasting them in the 2023 season, hopefully.
You nailed the problem! It may take a few years for customers to compare your tree ripened peaches to the crap the resellers are hawking at the farmer’s market. The results can be amazing when they do.
We only have to sell a couple acres of peaches so I can’t imagine the difficulty of trying to sell more than 10 acres of peaches. We used to compete with other growers at several farm markets but we now sell everything we grow direct from the farm in just two 5 hour mornings but it took a while to get here. We get $30/peck and some folks drive a long way to get them. Just a couple of local peach growers in my area with 2-5 acres but they sell for about 1/2 my price. They are “old school” growers who sell a lot of bushels at low prices to customers who want to can/freeze of make jelly. The really large growers with 50 or more acres in a well know NC peach growing area called the sandhills have spots at just about every farmer’s market within 100 mile radius of their farm and also have farmstands on major highways. Home made peach ice cream is very popular in the farmstands They also sell a lot of wholesale peaches to smaller grocery stores but the huge peach farms that used to pack and ship railcar loads of peaches up north are gone from NC.
We have experienced the problem where frost killed a lot of the fruit so that some varieties only have enough to attract bugs and some varieties like Contender are loaded… We have tried removing the fruit from those trees and also tried spraying at the same time as the productive trees which wasted chemicals. We finally decided that spraying alternate rows on the unproductive trees worked best for our situation.
Please post some pictures when you get everything planted and pruned. Love to see it!
I’ve just tried Tiana for the first time this year. It’s just been hard for me to sell these super hard peaches (like Gloria) to my customers. But maybe others would have better luck in other parts of the country. Tiana and Selena are the hard type. Messina and Desiree are regular melting flesh type peaches.
I’ve grown Messina and Desiree. Desiree is a good peach, but we generally get too much rain early in the season, so I had issues with early peaches tasting watered down. Eventually I got rid of anything which ripened 3 weeks before Redhaven.
If I were recommending removing a variety from your order, it would be Messina. Messina was very unproductive for us. I just looked back in my notes which listed “terrible production”. I don’t use such strong words in my notes, except for peaches which produce very very little on average. Bounty is another peach which would fall in that category, in our area.
I post peach evaluations of peaches we are currently growing, but we’ve tried many more, which didn’t make the grade in our area. I wish there was more research on productive peaches in marginal areas. Unfortunately all the research is done in areas which are good peach growing areas like Cream Ridge, NJ, or in the fruit belt in MI. Even NC and SC, although somewhat challenging areas for peach production tend to have better weather than our area, imo.
I’ve paid thousands of dollars in lost peach production and wasted space trying so many varieties.
In terms of a list of peach varieties, I think Fusion’s consolidated list of my reviews is pretty close to what I’d recommend based on where I’m at on the research right now. Here’s a list I’d recommend with a few changes to Fusion’s. This list would be based on consistent production, with good flavor, no overwhelming issues of bac. spot.
*Earlystar:-22 yellow
*Risingstar:-14 yellow
*PF9a-007:-5 yellow
*Clayton:-5 recommended with the condition that the fruit is smaller and easily drops if left too long on the tree.
*Redhaven:-0 yellow
*Challenger:+7 yellow 950 hrs chill
*Winblo: +14
*Ernies Choice: +14
*Intrepid: +15 possible recommendation. Still too early to tell.
*Contender:+21 yellow
*Veteran:+22 yellow
*Baby Crawford:+24 yellow
*PF24c:+24
*Madison:+27 yellow
*Carolina Gold:+29 yellow
*PF35-007:+35 yellow
Laurol:+38
*Victoria:+45 yellow
I just looked back at my previous peach reports. 2018 was the first year I reported on it on the forum. I gave it positive reviews. Likewise in 2019. It was blank in both 2020 and 2021.
It looks like 2022 was the first year it had all the split pits. I’m pretty sure I’ve never had issues selling fruit of Victoria. It tastes really nice. It’s not productive in marginal years, but it’s the only variety I can find which ripens that late. I’m currently trialing PF Legacy, but it’s more of a replacement for Autumnstar, than a replacement for Victoria.
I don’t have a lot of experience refrigerating peaches, since we don’t have commercial refrigeration, though it’s on my wish list.
As I’m sure you know, peach trees are very vigorous and can easily get away from you. In the future, when you have less prunings, you might consider doing what we do. We prune the trees, and rather than pick them up, we just throw the prunings in the the row middles. Then I bushhog them. It shreds them pretty good. A flail mower would work better, but a regular rotary mower works pretty well. We mow them backing up the aisles so that sticks don’t get caught under the orchard tractor and tear up hydraulic lines. We mow stuff up to about 2" in diameter. It makes a lot of racket, but it saves a lot of time dealing with the prunings.
I can totally empathize with your experience. Like Rick (Blueberrythrill) we gave up farmer’s markets a few years ago. All the packing up equipment, driving to wherever, setting up, tearing down, only to compete with hucksters buying peaches, it just wasn’t worth it.
Customers just can’t tell the difference between fruit picked close to ripe, vs fruit picked 10 days early. Customers will pass up tree ripened fruit to go to a vendor they’ve done business with before. It takes time to build up a clientele at a farmers market. Some markets were better than others.
Like Rick, we just eventually made the switch to selling everything at our fruit stand. Lots less hassle. But it took a while to get there and we aren’t selling peaches from 15 acres. We are on a fairly busy road, which helps. The thing which helped the most was Facebook. I hate to offer a plug for Facebook, because it’s the most user unfriendly site I know of, not to mention all the tracking they do. But people use that medium, so I have to use it. We only have about 3000 followers of our Facebook page, but I really haven’t tried to advertise to get more because we can’t even provide for the demand for 3000 followers.
I have a friend who grows lots of fruit and has 30K followers on his Facebook page.
It was hard to sell everything the first few years we opened our larger orchard. But word of mouth and Facebook really helped. Now all we have to do is open the gates and people will start stopping by. I also notice if there are more cars in our parking area, more cars will stop in. Paul Friday used to recommend having your employees park their cars out front, until lots of customers started to fill up the lot, then have employees move their cars to the back (sort of prime the pump).
We have sort of the same issue. For years we have been behind on the early peaches. I wasn’t too worried because they aren’t the best quality. But I’ve changed my mind. The early peaches are what customers scream for. As long as it’s decent quality peach, customers want that “first taste of summer”. If I had to do it over again, I’d pay more attention to planting more peaches starting 3 weeks prior to Redhaven.
We went up to charging $3 per lb. for peaches and our field grown tomatoes this year (tax included). I was a bit worried I’d lose business. But I can’t tell much reduction in business, if any.
Next year the plan is to go all Upick on peaches (I think). I’m sure I’ll lose some business and probably won’t sell all we produce. But labor is getting to be too big an issue. Next year I lose my best employee who has been with me for four years. He can pick fast and requires no supervision. He can run the stand. He can do anything I can do. It would take 3 people to replace him, and 3 more people doesn’t work in our budget.
We did a lot of PYO peaches after I hurt my back and could not get them all picked. It worked OK with close supervision but the PYO peaches really need to sell for a higher price than pre-picked. Sounds crazy at first, but the PYO folks always knock a lot of fruit on the ground that could be sold. We have also found that most PYO customers are buying an experience rather than just fruit and are not very price sensitive. I see that lots of other orchards charge a entrance fee in addition to the cost of the fruit. Seems cumbersome to us. Another local orchard calls this purchase a “fruit picking experience” and sells it for around $15 per person which may include a small bag of fruit . EDIT: Should have mentioned their marketing plan is very successful and I estimate they may sell $25K or more on a busy Saturday but it requires a lot of employees
My son who bought the farm is trying to find the balance between prepicked and PYO peaches. He hates the waste and the close supervision required for the PYO customers and limits the peach PYO activity to just the last week.
I would not pay extra to pick my own, but I would pay extra to work with someone experienced and who could guide me to the peaches most likely to meet my needs. I want some for fresh eating and some to can for winter. Guided picking tours maybe?
One thing I notice in these threads is that three varieties show up repeatedly: Redhaven, Contender, and Carolina Gold. I’m very partial to Carolina Gold.
Carolina Gold would not sweeten up at all for me … 10 brix in some years. All of the other NC peaches did much better. Not sure why it was not so good for me. Overall I am happy to see these NC peaches are finally getting some attention, they were obscure for a long time. I gave out wood to many people as they are some of my favorites.
@Olpea FYI I gave up on Rochester this year, it is a good peach but has many of the defects of the older peaches such as stringy flesh. In general I am reducing the number of heirloom peaches as there are better modern ones. I still like Heath Cling and Oldmixon Free a lot, and St. John and Foster can be very good. Most of the modern ones I really like are in fact nectarines… I keep removing peaches and putting in nectarines. This year Arctic Glo, Sunglo, Flavortop, Freckle Face, and Summer Beaut were all great.
