Just off the phone with Vaughn…they said they dont have any more trees left…(had a bad year she said).
Cumberland Valley… called them and they had everything i asked for.
Vaughn almost always sell out early for all their trees.
We have already placed orders for next year. Adams County also sells out early on some stuff.
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As for PYO, we spray sulfur and it can leave a residue that is very irritating to some people. Peach picking in our area is on days that are frequently humid and above 90 degrees after 10:30 am. Many people ask and the few I let pick take 20 minutes to select 10 peaches. During that process they tend to discard at least 10 that could have been sold. Another factor that stays on my mind is that they are novice fruit prickers. They may tell others the fruit picked from my orchard is poor quality, which would be true, but only because the person that picked the fruit had no experience. For me to sell high quality fruit at a high price it must be picked by an experienced picker. The labor saving for picking and marketing is insignificant when considering the additional labor necessary to supervise the pickers. The only way it could ever make sense for us would be to sell at our regular retail price or above. PYO sounds nice but picking is hard work that should be done 5-10 am in my area and requires some refined skill.
We did try running over the sticks with the 10 ft rotary cutter and with a skid steer with a heavy duty brush cutter during the first summer. There were many larger limbs and long sticks left over. It seemed like sticks were popping up everywhere. One day, I was holding up one of my children to pick a piece of fruit. I stepped on a stick that was buried in the 6-8" tall grass that popped up tripping me. As I was stumbling I put the child down and almost stepped on her head while continuing to stumble. That incident occurred after I was already frustrated by the hidden sticks on several occasions. I decided we needed to start off with a clean orchard floor. I even purchased a landscape rake and raked every stick I could get. I know they should have rotted but I felt it needed to happen faster. Hopefully, the cuttings will be 1-2" next year and the rotary cutter will work well.
Olpea:
I think I lumped all the NJ varieties together and only remembered the negative. It is difficult to keep the information separated without taking notes. My farm came with a 1970’s, 8 door cooler and a cool/chilling room. The chilling room was a room connected to the office. It had 2’ insulation board lining the walls and a window AC with a device that allows the thermostat to be set to 33 degrees. However, the AC ices over after a couple days if the room is set below 45 degrees. Although the research I found suggests 35-50 degrees is not a good temp range for peaches I had no quality issues with fruit picked ripe and that were kept in that range for a week. If you really want a cooler, you may be able to get one on cheap on allsurplus.com or craigslist. Many stores and kitchens change out nice coolers during remodels. Often the refrigeration company charges for removal then sells the coolers installed at a steep discount when compared to buying new.
Our Carolina Gold could have been a bit sweeter but not one person complained. Around the same time, that they were ripening the guys picked some huge red over red peaches. Normally, Red Haven is my favorite but these peaches were the best I have had. The flavor was a bit inconsistent within the variety, but I managed to eat any I could find. I was not at the farm during the picking. Getting the location of those peaches a few days later through two people and a language barrier proved impossible. According to the notes that came with the farm, we do have Red Skin and Flame Prince that would ripen around that time. I think Flame Prince are usually red over yellow. Unfortunately, the man that planted my trees did not keep the best notes and often mixed varieties that ripen in the same window. That is a real pain when some of the peach skins are more yellow and others are more red. The customers thought the yellow ones were unripe and I had to do too much explaining. It is a pain for the guys to skip trees with yellow peaches and then come back up the same row to pick only yellow. Do any of you have Flame Prince? How is bacterial resistance, freeze tolerance, colored, and flavored?
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Red on red sounds a lot like Ruston Red.
Thank you for that perspective. It’s useful to hear from a grower working on a big scale like yourself.
I’m really not advocating for PYO peaches, especially since we only do it as a last resort but the economics can be as good or better than paying folks to pick and pack fruit on a smaller scale like an acre or two. Takes us one person 4 hours to supervise a $3000 peach PYO event. Takes one very focused person 8-10 hours to pick and pack $3000 of fruit in peck boxes. Another person is required to manage the cash register which handles the money for PYO and pre-picked peck boxes so that is not an additional cost for for the PYO. We see and agree about the waste from PYO customers who knock some fruit on the ground. Also some waste from the fruit which is pre-picked and graded where second quality must be sold for a lower price. A higher PYO price could tilt the economics in it’s favor. I agree completely that skilled labor is required to pick the perfect fruit you want associated with your farm and your brand. That type of labor is almost impossible to find in my area so we are testing alternatives. It’s probably easier for folks with just a couple of acres to work out the alternatives to the tradition pick/cool/pack/sell model. Most large peach growers in NC and Virginia I have visited with are focused on the traditional model but one very large peach grower in Virginia is very successful with PYO peaches. He also owns a huge PYO Apple orchard too in addition to his commercial apple orchards with CA storage.
We grow Flame Prince but we cut out half of the trees. The trees are huge. The fruit is good but it’s harder to determine when its ripe. Also noticed it does not melt in your mouth like the earlier varieties in my location. It ripens in my hot humid climate about mid August when we are worn out and ready for vacation! The names are confusing but Fire Prince is another excellent GA peach. Ripens after Red Haven and just before Winblo. It’s a yellow melting flesh with red blush.
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The double red peach would not be Redskin. I’ve grown Redskin for well over a decade (the bloom on my forum avatar is a Redskin bloom) and it doesn’t color well at all. Not only does it have a light red blush which covers at most 3/4 of the peach, some years it will still have some green on the stem end even when the peach is ripe.
I’m not sure why it was named Redskin, other than perhaps because it’s redder than Elberta. It’s an offspring of Elberta and sometimes called Redskin Elberta.
That’s interesting. I had considered making a “home made” cooling room with a shipping container, air conditioner, and a cool bot controller. I hadn’t heard that the air conditioners can freeze up. Thanks for the head’s up about that and about looking for a used commercial cooler.
Thanks for reporting on that Scott. I’ve always thought most of the older rare peaches are rare because the new ones are improved. Sometimes fruit breeding programs emphasize the wrong things at the cost of eating quality, but I think that’s been less of the case with peaches.
It can be fun for people to try to find a “discarded diamond” fruit from the past, but mostly I think they find a piece of coal. Clayton, which you found, has been good for me. That’s the good news. Namely, letting you sift through the rocks to find the few diamonds for us. 
I wanted to ask, is Oldmixon Free a tart peach as grown in MD?
It is normal acidity … in other words not low-acid. Sometimes they don’t ripen properly and they will be tart so maybe you just got that type? This year a few buggy ones ripened too early and they were tart, but the normal ripening period ones were great. I think you grew Lady Nancy at some point? It is difficult to tell any difference between these two peaches in terms of flavor. They seem related in fact, the ripening period is almost the same, pit is similar shape, etc.
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I think my device is a cool bot. My HVAC friend said an ac is typically 15-20 degrees cooler than the air it pulls from the room. In that case, it is easy to get the coils below 32 degrees. Once that happens every time the door is opened and humidity enters the room it freezes on the coils. I was told commercial coolers have the coil fins inches apart so that the ice doesn’t impede air flow. Commercial coolers also have a cycle where they run in reverse for a short period of time to melt the ice that has accumulated on the coils. With all that said the cool bot room worked fine but I tore it to use that space in another way. If the storage container doesn’t work out you might consider using an enclosed trailer. I think an enclosed trailer would be nice to store fruit straight from the field. It would also be a good way to transport to markets, etc.
Has anyone here grown Fairtime? I was told it is a good peach but it tends to drop fruit. The person suggested using foliar applied calcium to thicken the stems to prevent the droppage, any experience with that?
[quote=“Olpea, post:47, topic:48206”]
That’s interesting. I had considered making a “home made” cooling room with a shipping container, air conditioner, and a cool bot controller. I hadn’t heard that the air conditioners can freeze up. Thanks for the head’s up about that and about looking for a used commercial cooler.
[/quote
We have a homemade 8 x 8 walk in cooler with 2 inches of styofoam and some spray foam on top to seal the cracks. Started with commercial refrigeration in the homemade box but when it died we replaced it with a window unit and a coolbot. Pretty easy to hold 40 degrees with that setup but it froze up a few times when we put 1000 pounds of hot peaches in it. Worked great to hold peaches over until Saturday that we did not sell on Wednesday. 12000 BTU is technically 1 ton of cooling but 1 ton of cooling from commercial refrigeration equipment is a lot more effective than a 12000 BTU AC. I believe a used commercial cooler box with a coolbot would work a lot better than my coolbot in a homemade box.
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I don’t have any experience with that, but would be interested to know when it should be applied.
We have a lot of drop issues with late season peaches. A Ca spray would be cost effective if it slowed drops considerably. A lot of peaches starting about +25 drop even when we are picking them firm ripe.
I wondered about that too. Foliar calcium is common on Apples but I have not seen the benefits of foliar calcium discussed at any Peach grower meeting or in any research on Peach production from NCSU.
I do see foliar calcium recommended by the companies that make it for just about everything!
Best research I could find showed no improvement in “fruit soluble solids concentration (SSC), fruit firmness, fruit internal breakdown, and fruit flesh calcium concentration at harvest” for Peaches
The person that told me about the Calcium sprays has decades of experience and grows thousand of trees. He suggested it thickens the stems which in turn decreases fruit drop.
The same week I was told about the Calcium I happen to drop some tissue samples at the Waters Lab. The Waters Lab employee I spoke with made some great points and has me convinced to try foliar analysis every 2 weeks next season.
Here’s an interesting fact. In the spring, I fertilized the entire orchard, row middles included. The only variety to approach having a full crop was Contender. Then in September, I had the Waters Lab perform a foliar analysis on all the varieties. All the varieties that I assume were freeze damaged are Nitrogen deficient. The only variety with adequate Nitrogen is Contender. That’s exactly the opposite of what I expected. However, it could mean my trees didn’t produce not because of the freeze but because I didn’t apply enough fertilizer. I frequently find myself in these situations where I’m learning expensive lessons. It’s sort of like paying tuition.
Further comparing farming to school, it’s like constantly having an open book test but all the resources have conflicting information. Point in case, when learning to prune by the book I understood that upright shoots should be removed. A couple weeks ago, I read that the buds throughout the tree actually have varying chill hours and upright buds tend to have the longest chill hour requirement. I specifically remember my meticulous very experienced pruner telling me that I was cutting too many uprights. He said, those will produce if we have a late freeze. If there is not a freeze, we will remove them later. He also pointed out that I was doing a very good job pruning like he had learned to do when he took a class decades ago at the beginning of his career. He then told me a story of how his neighbors 10 year old son was helping him to prune and pointed out his classroom pruning style was pruning to grow trees but not fruit.
At the time, I was struggling to develop a set of rules for what to cut and that suggestion made it even more complicated. Not wanting to deal with this new conflicting suggestion, I didn’t devote much effort to applying it. Now, it’s easy to see I made a the wrong choice by following what I had read over what he had shared. It turns out that the lesson a 10 year old boy taught my friend decades ago was more valuable than all the information I have read about pruning over the last year. I don’t know why it’s easier to accept “research” as fact when we all know there are researchers in every field that are biased or not very good at researching in general.
The same person that suggested Calcium told me to be very careful of university publications. He said the publications often present problems that are fabrications created and sometimes solved by the researcher in order to justify their position. He also pointed out almost none of the researchers ever spend time on a farm. I don’t know if those things are true but I will definitely analyze published information and experience based advice more strongly moving forward. Personally, I have not seen many peach problems presented in university publications. One thing I can attest to is many extension publications seem to repeat generic information and lack finer points.
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Around here it’s known among peach growers that a foliar spray of N in the late fall increases the winter bud hardiness of peaches. I’m not surprised if it also increases the bloom hardiness.
We generally spray the trees about this time in the fall with a foliar N (about 30 lbs. of actual N per acre in a split application). Use a lower biuret urea and it doesn’t burn the leaves as badly.
We only remove the vigorous upright shoots when pruning in the fall. The thick upright shoots which are branched we remove no matter what. One can’t grow fruit on them anyway without shading the whole tree out. In the spring, after the fruit has set, if it’s a lean crop, we remove any shoots which don’t have fruit on them and leave the ones that do, even if they are upright.
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What foliar N do you use? I “learned” pruning after August prevents the tree from entering dormancy and increases the chance of winter injury and fertilizer is not picked up after August. However, an old research article I read suggested October fertilization is beneficial and anything not picked up will be available to the tree the next spring.
Excellent point. Some of the info I have received from the researchers in my state has been wrong for my area and quite a bit of out of state research does not work here.
I would favor the opinion of another grower in my area over all other sources including the PHD fruit specialist and especially the chemical manufacturers.
From what I have seen the usefulness of academic research varies and the research done in one area may not be valid for your area even if it was done in your state. I experienced this when the plant breeders suggested SHB blueberries for my area which was a total bust. Researchers In my state spend a huge amount of time with the growers, especially the large growers which is good. Some of that research shows up in publications like the list of preferred Peach varieties I posted a while back. I have also noticed they speak confidently about topics they understand well and are not always open to new ideas. Also noticed that many of the research studies are paid for by the companies that make the chemicals they are testing.
I do rely heavily on the research produced in my state, especially for spray programs. I also test alternate production recommendations (not pesticide) from time to time. The tests are not really valid field trials but still provide some useful information. Many of the varieties I grow were bred in my state so the folks at the research farm normally have a lot of experience with the varieties I’m growing.
We have found that nothing beats trial and error using your varieties on your farm.
Edit: We have done some tissue testing in the past but it was done much earlier in the season. Not sure how the timing would impact the results but I’m sure the lab would know.
Mike Leathers Ranchers Rules can be adapted to this conversation.
“Judge your cattle by how they perform in the pastures, NOT by theories made up at some college. (You have to clear a profit to stay in business, the researchers don’t.)”
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I recently got a Redskin peach and have not seen it in local markets or for sale as a tree… In the 1950s it was a relatively new cultivar… interesting to see a similar style report on peaches from the 50s.
I think this wording sums it up best.
“Because the number of new varieties of peach-
es has increased greatly in recent years, it is dif-
ficult for a peach grower to decide which of them
are best suited to his needs. Only those which
please the consumer and are adapted to your soil
and climatic conditions should be considered”
Thanks for posting. It’s interesting that bud hardiness is mentioned for almost every variety. When I ask nursery representatives about bud hardiness they act as if that information is unknown. It’s as if there is motivation for them to sell me trees that don’t work well.
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