the provenance is a thing of beauty, have to say! Your 40 yr old(and still fruitful) peach tree, is the first thing have come across here in usa. It is not just rare, but evidently, one of a kind!
since it is seed-grown, you’ve got to give it a name, maybe name it after your grandmother. You have full rights to it as your “property”.
and as you’ve indicated–you’ve seen other peach trees decline and wither away right before your eyes(just as many members here have witnessed for ourselves), having grown peaches all your life, and that makes your 40 yr old equivalent of peach methuselah worthy of a page at national geographic, better homes and gardens, etc. Maybe even a centerfold!
expect zaiger to be knocking on your door offering a lucrative transaction
Wow, you truly flattered me comparing my tree to Methuselah haha! =D Seriously I have spent most of my life showing people my tree and giving them the fruit and no one except for my grandmother has ever shared my joy and enthusiasm for the tree until now. When I showed the realtor who came a few weeks ago to look at my home she just said “oh thats pretty”. You are all wonderful thank you for the uplifiting comments form everyone!
You are all giving me so many crazy ideas and maybe I jus might start doing some of them. Like starting maybe 50 grafted seedlings and making a large poster board of info and pics and see if I can sell them at farmers markets to start. More than money I would love the idea that this trees DNA would live on and not perish and die in this backyard after all these years when my home is sold (even though I do plan on taking seeds and cuttings of this extremely cold hardy peach with me when I move north). I have a huge tin of peach pits that I would be more than happy to goive to anyone who wants them but the thing is the seeds do not grow the exact tree as evident of how the very tree started life. The pollinating insects can change what grows after fertilizing the blossom. Plusthey are already maybe 5 years old so if you want to wait until September I can send seeds to anyone who wants a few!! But the only sure way to get a tree exactly with this fruit is to get a grafted baby.
You know I have to point out that I live in Denver and we have had legalized marijuana since 2012. I grow maybe 6 indica plants every summer and I gotta say, peaches and cannabis (white peach pie, white peach ice cream) growing side by side is beautiful and one pleasure that makes life good at the stressful old age of 45 =D
With this amazing longevity and obviously other qualities, I would say it is worth developing a peach/nectarine rootstock out of this tree. I know rooting peach cuttings is very difficult, but perhaps you should try, it is worth the effort. You may also try connecting with one of the breeding programs as they may be able to asexually propagate it via tissue culture.
That sounds amazing and unbelivable and I would absolutely love for the tree to be my grandmothers legacy and I would not have the SLIGHTEST idea of where to begin or WHO to contact or what! =D Seriously I am just ecstatic that other people in the world actually find my peach tree as amazing as I have always known it was. My friends do call me every year to ask if they cam come get peaches “off that one big tree with the huge white peaches”, even people I havent talked to for years and my yellow flesh peaches and other white flesh peaches on the other trees are all left for the squirrels and the 2 foxes that live back there haha (another amazing feature of my yard - a fox family has been living there since the 1980s, right in the middle of downtown Denver, and I get to see their little baby kits every couple years). =)
I just checked the internet. Some said the Tibetan peach can live over thousand years. 300 years old peach tree is common in that area. The oldest living Tibetan peach is 680 years. The fruit is bitter but if it could be used as root stock that would be something.
From wiki:
The trees are cultivated in some parts of their native range, for their fruit (which is often pickled), their seeds (as a substitute for almonds), and for their seed oil, which is used for cooking and hair oil.[2] The rootstocks are used for almonds and for dwarfing peach trees, and are resistant to powdery mildew
I know there are def ancient stone fruit trees (cherry especially) in its native land (China) but personally I have never seen a peach tree that was older than 20, 25 maybe and that was in Georgia where it’s hot and sea level. My house is at 5280 feet above sea level in the rocky mountain range and it gets COLD here!
I know rootstock would be ideal because of the longevity and hardiness but I have grown peaches my whole life and I have tasted several commercial peaches like the yellow donut or the white donut or saturn or the peach cobbler peach and several others but I have never tasted a better peach that was less acidic and sweeter than these greenish white peaches, and Im not just saying that because theyre mine, really! lol. Not to mention the JUICE. The only question is how would the fruit hold up in shipping.
Annie,
Up thread around post # 27, Scott posted pics of peaches in Tibet. In post #30 by @jujubemulberry, he was able to identify the Tibet peaches are not persica. It is a different type.
One of a sure way for members here to help you spread this peach variety is by grafting. That would mean collecting scionwood from your tree. It can be done the mid or late summer.
I am sure we could be happy to pay for shipping and handling and even royalty
nothing beats a ‘rootstock’ that also produces excellent fruit. That it is 40 years of age and still productive sure proves its mettle against the elements, plus pests/diseases. That it is tough below-ground just as it is tough above-ground makes it so valuable
you don’t have to answer this query(lest you get bombarded with requests, so just PM me ) but has it produced suckers?
your peach tree is an absolute unicorn. It would also make an excellent case study re: longevity/precocity/senescence if you can obtain suckers from it. A few more questions: do you have wood borers/canker, etc in your area(like-- would you have first-hand accounts of such pests and illnesses affecting/killing other peach trees nearby)?
if you do, then that further makes your peach methuselah even more special.
I wanted to save those pics of those ancient Tibetan peach trees but they were so blurry. Beautiful trees. The street view pic was cool too. They looked more like apricots though in that pic - too small and too yellow but then again I am used to larger peaches with a lot more red blushing here in CO. My neighbor has apricots and I always wondered how apricot cross pollinated with the green peach would be. I saw last summer white flesh apricots at the grocery store and they were truly the best apricots I have ever had because they were juicier than normal apricots.
I am hoping to move by the end of the year but it takes time so who knows when I will actually be able to move. As for bugs I am really lucky when it comes to that. One summer I had a veracious attack of ear wigs in the bark but it only lasted a summer and they never mettled in the actual fruit or pits like some do. I never sprayed pesiticed and they disappeared the following year.
Oh, and as for the suckers yes that tree almost died once about 10 years ago when it was hit hard with earwigs for a summer. I truly thought it was at its end of the line and was ready to retire but the next summer it came back as strong as ever and grew tons of suckers out of the sides of the main trunk. If you look you can see it started another entire tree (actually I counted 3 around the tree) out of the side of the trunk from suckers
When the time is right just shoot me an email and I’ll do what I can to try and send anyone who would like a small branch to graft. I promise you won’t be disappointed and if you love peaches it might just become your favorite variety, I’m only planning on selling small grafting seedlings for $10 a pop to start off at the farmers markets. I wish I knew more people in these circles so I could do more than that!
On a side n ote I stated that in 2003 we had 3 consec. days of -14 nights and all m peach trees died off except my giant greenish white peach tree and this one that was only a year old at the time and amazingly survived. This one is not white though, it is yellow flesh and it is not freestone, it is clingstone. It is most likely a direct descendant of the original mother tree that was only 20 feet further north to where this is. So I suspect this is where the “hardy green” peach came from and then was cross pollinated with the green gage. This one is already 19 years old and fruits large yellow peaches.
Mamuang is that a mango on your profile there? The peach is my FAVORITE fruit of all the wonderful fruits in the world BUT my second favorite is the MANGO! The tropical peach! =D I watched a beautiful documentary a few years back on this amazing trek these scientists made in somewhere in east Asia, I forgot exactly what country, the Philippines maybe but they were looking for this legendary WHITE FLESH MANGO tree that was a GIANT that all these local villagers knew about for decades and would go there to pick white flesh mangoes. They were planning on bringing it back to propagate and bring to the market and ever since then I have been IMPATIENTLY waiting to see a WHITE FLESH mango at the store!
) but has it produced suckers?
