My Black Boy now dropping fruit- Oct 7. This 8-year old tree is a vigorous grower and sets fruit annually. The branches, however, are prone to splitting even without a fruit load.
The interior fruit color is beautiful …BUT the taste is bitter, bitter! Brix of 13.
My other mid-summer peaches Salish Summer, Avalon, Betty, and Nanaimo do much better. Perhaps not enough heat units for a late-bearer in maritime NW.
Tree is headed for the grafting block and, if I’m not successful, it’s curtains for this 10’ vigorous grower. Scions available in Feb if anyone wants to try it!
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It looked beautiful, didn’t it?
Glad I was not the only one tasting bitterness in Black Boy. My India Free did not get enough sun and did not have enough sugar. Both grafts were gone now.
Interesting about the bitterness. We don’t experience that with Black Boy (or Indian Free) in coastal Northern California.
I didn’t get any bitterness with mine either.
I also never even had hint of bitterness in IF or BB… it looks like they need plenty of heat or sun or both.
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In re the “bitterness”
The skin on these is relatively fuzzier than other peaches, and thicker too, I think . The perceived bitterness may be coming from that. I love the INDIAN FREE peach but I do eat it like a kiwi. I slice it into halves and then scoop out the meat with a soup spoon.
May seem like alot of trouble just to eat a peach, but when they are good… they are great (also keeps me from ruining shirts with the dark juice running down my chin) 
What would be a good nectarine to cross this with?
Mike
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Arctic Glo is one I did but lost the seedlings. I will do it again.
Indian Free is easy to graft to also. Every graft I ever tried took (five grafts).
Arctic Glo
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The tree has grown out some. It’s eighth leaf now.
I got the black boy tree from Raintree about 4 years ago. It has been fruiting since year 2 and this year I harvested about a bushel of very nice, clean peaches with only 2 sprays in the spring.
The fruits are medium small and tend to be on the tart/sweet side. I have never tasted anything bitter at all. But the strong raspberry like aroma is wonderful and very unique. It’s like eating a handful of raspberries at once. I would highly recommend this peach tree to anyone.
This tree is relatively easy to grow. It’s quite resistant to peach leaf curl. Also compared to other peaches that I grow (Saturn, Sweet Bagel and others), it seems that the bugs and brown rots don’t bother it that much (this is contrary to Scott’s observation).
I think its thicker and harder fuzzy skin actually makes the difference. It’s hard and bitter from May till September when it suddenly starts to ripe. So PC and OFM don’t bother with it that much. In contrast to Black Boy, my Saturn is almost 50% damaged by PC and then brown rot even with many more sprays.
However this year I observed that Black Boy started to ripe from core, so if you treat it like other peach and let it hang on tree for too long (to get that soft touch on skin), it will rot from inside. That’s probably the reason that Scott found it tend to rot. So pick it when it’s still hard inside and outside but tastes ripe. You can keep it in a refrigerator for a while.
Anyway, this is a very easy to grow peach with a unique taste. It’s just different than your regular boring Red Haven peach. 
Oh, btw I am in southeast Pennsylvania so it’s a bad area to grow peaches (even though there are many wonderful Amish peach orchards in the nearby Lancaster area so I only grow something unique). The black boy is in a shaded area with about 4 hours of sun each day. It’s quite amazing that I was able to harvest a bushel of beautiful clean peaches from a 4 years old tree.
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They need a lot of heat and dry heat.
Not necessarily, in my experience. BB is doing very well for me on the coast north of San Francisco, where we have cool summers and frequent fog. I readily agree that it’s less humid that the Southeast, but it’s not arid even in the midst of our drought.
I gave a raintree BB Peach to my friend a few years ago and it was loaded this year (he lives in the Philadelphia suburbs). He said it has raspberry/blackberry overtones. I had one today that he had saved in his fridge for a couple weeks and its the best peach i’ve ever had. My sister agreed. It was so good.
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Be warned that it can take five or more years for brown rot to spread through your orchard. My Black Boy rotted badly and not from the inside.
I took it out several years ago but it would do fine for me now as currently I spray a synthetic for rot.
If you had to pick one of those two for our climate, which one would it be?
No big difference. I had more mealiness on BB but in all other respects I noticed no real difference. Currently I have neither, Sanguine Tardeva is my primary source of red fleshed peaches… it is also very similar in looks and taste but is earlier ripening.
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Thanks for the hints, I grated Blackboy and Indian free last spring, so if Christine has issues, I am likely to have to cut mine to another variety as well. I get a bit more sun but probably not enough
Dennis
Kent, wa
The neighboring white donut nectarines and Saturn peaches all had bad brown rots in last couple of years but at least in my own experience, BB stood out as the easiest but also very tasty and unique peach (other than yellow peaches which I can buy in Amish orchards at very reasonable price) to grow in mid Atlantic area, so far.
My BB peach had rots in the core, not on the skin. The rots looked very different from brown rots. I think it’s kind of like the rotten core problems with some pears.