I agree with @Ahmad. I look for a pin dot that is dark and may exude a little gum as the sign of a living worm. I have seen a few exceptions but not enough to pick off any non dark dot fruits.
I am finally done with thinning here, my trees are getting more mature and it was a lot of work!
Thanks @Ahmad and @scottfsmith
I have picked off pin dot ones. In my experience, if I bagged the pin dot ones, they often turned into full blown worm-infested peaches inside Clemson bags.
For those who grow donut and nectarine peaches, I have a question for you.
This is the first year I have donut nectarines. I have noticed that they often have gummy substance at their calyx ends. I see them more on donut nectarines than donut peaches.
Are these physiological characteristics of donut peaches and nectarines? Whenever I see gummy substance, I am a bit nervous.
Wait a minute! I just saw your greenhouse, and I love it. I’ve never had one and know nothing about them. However, I thought a big part of how they work was that the sun shines on them and heats the inside because the warmer air can’t easily get out. So how does yours work if it doesn’t get sun? Or am I just wrong about the general principles of how greenhouses work (very possibly)?
I hope your donut peaches are as good as mine…OMG are they great. Setting aside the whole donut shape thing, they are just super good, sweet white peaches. I find they need more thinning than other peaches to size up well, btw. This is hard considering they also set heavier than most of my peaches.
For what its worth, I’ve never seen that gummy substance on mine, and I’d be nervous too. Hope its ok.
Sorry I’m commenting on 3 different posts you’ve made in the last few months all at once, but I wanted to say my experience is similar to @Ahmad in that I often have plums that get the crescent shape fruit but go on to stay on the tree and ripen well and make good fruit, so I’m not sure you should pluck all fruit with crescent scars. That being said, I always thought the reason for this was that my imidan had the power to actually kill an egg or larvae AFTER the scar was made and an egg was deposited. But I don’t know that. I’d say probably 70% of my fruit with the half-moon scars drop, so you aren’t wasting a LOT by culling all of them, but you might be throwing away a decent amount that would survive??? Then again, I don’t think you use Imidan so if my theory is correct that its kick back that might not apply to you.
Mine are doing the same, I think it is physiological.
Kevin,
I don’t have a green house. Maybe, the pic was someone else’s greenhouse.
Yes, Imidan has a good kickback effect that can kill larvae inside the fruit. Often, my fruit that have scars or oozed frass were toasted.
@ahmad - that’s a relief re. gummy substance at the calyx ends.
Yesterday I convinced my daughter (a totally non-gardener type) to check out my peaches and nectarines. I wanted her to know how to differentiate young nectarines from young peaches, (the fuzz vs non-fuzz thing).
Then, I showed her donut peaches.
Me: “This is a donut peach, Saturn”.
My daughter: “That’s interesting”.
Me: “That’s not it. Here are donut nectarines”.
My daughter : “The scientist went too far!!”.
Me: “!?!!”
I can’t wait to try the donut nectarines (new to me) and will definitely share them with my daughter.
Some of the donut peaches / Nectarines crack more or less so you see the gummy stuff. That’s why you need to be careful with timing of thinning these kinds of peaches. If you thin early, the leftover peaches will more likely develop the cracking. Peaches with bad cracking will be attacked by brown rot later.
What kind of donut nectarine do you grow? I had a Sauzee King tree from rain tree for several years and the fruits cracked badly. The tree was on the horrible citation stock and half died last year. I grafted scions on my “black boy” seedling and the tree is doing great. Sauzee King tastes very good, even better than Saturn. But it’s tricky to grow super sweet donut nectarines in our climate, cracking caused rot is a major problem.
Yes every donut variety is a bit different on how open or closed the calyx end is. I grew the original Peento from the USDA collection, it was very open and prone to rot at that point. Some varieties are completely closed off there, no issues at all. I think Sweet Bagel and TangOs had nice closed ends. All of them are gone from my orchard now, most were removed a long time ago due to rots and not for other issues.
I used to grow Saturn for several years. During those days, Saturn got rot but the tree Saturn was grafted on was removed. I grafted Saturn to a new tree. I hope it will be rot-free or rot minimal for me.
@Shuimitao - I also grafted Snack Time (aka Rapunzel) and H 13-23 donut nectarines.
Don’t know how rot-prone will these Snack Time and H 13-23 will be.
@BobVance and @ahmad have grown them more years than me.
ha! Well, I just spent 10 minutes trying to find who had the greenhouse I thought was yours but now I can’t even find the post and don’t even know what thread it was on, nor do I know how I got the idea it was yours! ha. But someone had set one up inside their garage and I was just curious how that would work since it wouldn’t get any sun heat, and if its in a garage I didn’t quite understand why it was needed. If that person sees this, I’m not saying its wrong to do that- I just don’t know anything about greenhouses and was curious how that would work.
I actually have never seen donut nectarines! Darn…gota add another tree now! BTW, I really enjoyed hearing you talk about showing orchard stuff to your daughter who isn’t so into orcharding. I had a friend come to my orchard a couple days ago to pick cherries. I ended up giving them a full tour of my orchard and when they left I realized that I had undoubtedly bored them to tears! haha I was showing them each tree, explaining why I pruned certain limbs, why I prune open center, how grafts work, etc. I forget that 99% of people could probably care less about all this. I was even explaining how Romance cherries were developed in Canada and how neat it is that they don’t have to be grafted and that root shoots can fruit and so on. My poor friend was just glazed over and undoubtedly thinking of how they could get out of there sooner! haha
Kevin,
Now that you reminded me, you are correct about the “green house”. We set up a temporary “green house” aka a tent in our garage last year to keep seedlings warm before planting them out.
This year, we have a 3rd car so one of them is parked in the garage. Thus, no room to set up that tent, You has such a good memory.
I have not tasted Snack Time or H 13-23 nectarines. @BobVance and @Ahmad probably have. Hope they will tell you about the taste and which varieties of donut nectarines ythey would recommend you.
I have not tried Snack Time yet, probably this year. However, several members here highly praised it. H13-23 is excellent, however this year it is badly cracking, perhaps I should have waited before thinning. Snack Time and Saturn are suffering from cracking too, but to a lesser extent than H13-23.
This is my first season to have a good crop on both, will let you know. However, the ones that cracked are not expected to fair well with Brown Rot…
I just finish thinning both varieties, too. We’ll see how they will turn out.
Well, not everything is rainbow and unicorn like I wish 
Canker took out a big chunk of my Freckle Face. I saw the dying limb first about two weeks ago. I was not sure why no leaves emerged from this one particular limb. A couple days ago, I saw the culprit in on the limb.
And more on the lower part of the limb.
I painted the tree trunk with white paint tp protect against sun scald.
Today, I took the whole limb off. You can see the dead top. The not dead limb was attached to it so I just had to take both out,
Sorry to see this… Hopefully the rest of the tree stays healthy…
I hope so, too. Freckle Face is my favorite nectarine.
Do you grow any Euro plums? Have you encounter black knot? I am very frustrated with black knot on my mirabelle. This early spring, I removed all black knots I could find. Two months late, more have showed up, much more than previous years. It is very discouraging to see.
I will try chlorothalonil next spring to see if it will help.
Last year I had to remove half my Bavay Green Gage tree because of too many strikes of black knot, some as big as 6” long… My Mirabelle de Nancy had several big ones too, but I was able to remove most of them without sacrificing whole scaffolds. I also removed a few medium size strikes from two of my pluots (including a whole branch from my Flavor King). This year, I have not scrutinized my trees for Black Knot yet.
By the way, how is the fruit set on your pluots this year? Which pluots do you still have?
My biggest losses this year are two apricot trees with major bacterial canker infections, all the way down to the main stem… Unfortunately, both have rare varieties grafted, so I am disappointed… I will leave the trees and see if they can recover (or how long they will survive) with some good fertilization or not. I also have two other cots that are growing very slowly and appear weak and unhappy, no signs of disease though…
