Besides our farm in NY, we rent a place in Santa Monica, CA for work, and I’ve planted a few fruit trees here just to satisfy the urge while we’re not home. One in particular has been a great selection for about 5 years now, an Eva’s Pride peach tree that needs very few chill hours and has produced a lot of peaches. Until now.
Last year, there were absolutely no peaches on our little tree, nor the standard-sized peach tree next door - likely because we had almost ZERO chill hours during the winter. This year, we had plenty of chill hours, and the tree next door is going crazy, but our little tree dropped a lot of fruitlets, and the ones that stayed on fell into two categories of peaches: normal sized, and oddly stunted. If you look at the picture, you’ll see two examples. This is the case all over the tree.
I thinned like always, and along with the fruit drop, it isn’t a case of too many fruits per branch. I sprayed with Neem Oil and liquid fish at the same time as I always have, which led to bumper crops in the past. Is there something happening here I don’t see?
I’ve had lots of the stunted peach and nectarine fruits this yr. More than normal and chilling was well below normal. I think it’s fruits that set but weren’t pollinated and thus don’t develop normally. Some yrs some of those make small peaches with no seed and little sweetness. It’s the hormonal effects of the seed that draws carbohydrates to the fruit.
It’s planted in the ground, had a lot of soil brought in to counteract the sand that lies about 5 feet down. The lack of pollination is confusing, because of the massive peach tree next door, plus a bit of careful hand-pollination PLUS this tree is supposed to be self-pollinating. Is it safe to say those stunted peaches will not get any bigger, and they should be thinned off the tree?
In better news, the Dwarf Cavendish Banana I planted in 2007 flowered after 10 long years!
Can you post a pic of the whole Cavendish tree, please? I bought the mother tree 3 years ago. It grew well in the summer but suffered winter in our house (cold and dry for bananas). It’s died but had many babies. Right now, I have several of them, I’ve grown them in pots.
They have so many babies I don’t know what to do with it. I’ve given them away to anyone who wants them.
Here you go! From what I recall, bananas have some odd male/female relationship, and if you don’t see flowering after a couple of years, you’re supposed to cut it down and let one of the little baby shoots at the bottom grow up to be the main tree, because it needs to be female.
Or perhaps I have that wrong; it was confusing, and cutting down the tree 3 or 4 times didn’t seem to help. This time I just let it be and forgot about it for about 3 years, and one day, the gigantic flower just appeared.
Ian,
I thought Dwarf Cavendish is not cold hardy to zone 6, where I live. Your zone is 5. How is that possible? Could you please share your secret on how to keep it alive outdoor? For mine, the mother tree is long gone.
I have Muss Basjoo which is supposed to be the most cold hardy of bananas. Mine needs winter protection and it stiil dies back to the ground every year.
Oh, yes - this banana tree is at our long-term rental place in Santa Monica… normally, all my fruit tree events occur at our house in Columbia County, NY (where this thing would have frozen solid long ago).
