I live in KS and inherited a small orchard when we bought our current home. I was able to loosely ID most of the trees by fruit last year but had 3 mystery trees because they didn’t produce. This year, two of them are producing the fruits pictured. One tree’s fruit is starting to soften and drop. The other’s fruit is still pretty hard.
The flesh on the fruit from the first tree is not terribly sweet or flavorful but pretty juicy for its small size and the skin is somewhat bitter. Are these apricots and, if so, what variety?
My guess is these are seedling peaches. Whenever I got pale colored, low quality peaches, they were peaches from seedlings or rootstocks. Like this one.
They look like the rootstock peach that I had sprout when the grafted variety was damaged. I saved the pits and started several new trees to graft onto.
Thanks. I was getting very confused because they looked like mini peaches. Are they good to use for anything other than growing more root stock? I was thinking I could press them and they might add some tartness to my cider which is only going to be made from dessert apples.
I may try to grow a couple new plants from them, as I lost 3 good peach trees this year due to wind. and have 3 other trees I can take grafts from . I’ll have to do some reading on that subject.
Crack the pits open and put the seeds in damp paper towel in a zip lock in the fridge. They will sprout in s few months. There is a thread here titled seed savers that explains the whole process
Some people pickle unripe peaches. If ripe, I don’t know what to do with ripe tasteless peaches.
Peach tree sets fruit as early as the 2nd year after planting. I don’t have a lot of space so I remove fruit trees that I don’t like.
Re. Grafting peach trees, it is not as easy as grafting apples or pears. Budding (t bud and chip bud) may be easier. Search old threads about those topics, there are several threads about them.
