After a dismal 2016 in which ZERO stone fruit buds survived here, in Purling NY about 40 miles south of Albany I am now giddy about 2017.
See below. Saturn peach, Toka(bubblegum) plum, Red Rapsberry nect, etc
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Very nice. I don’t know much about them, but they look really healthy. Are the flowers fragrant?
Mine are just starting to bloom. The bloom order is little confusing. The asian plums are all blooming at the same time, and peaches are out of usual sequence.
Holy cats! you better be ready to thin!
My Raspberry Red is in a pot…and its all blooms. I’m only going to let 10 or less fruit develop…
Saturn is full bloom here too. Seems like a very hardy peach…
Yup, the last time this very Saturn fruited I thinned about 400+ and I still had 385 fruits that were 2 1/2 - 3 1/2 inches across.
I thought that I had under-thinned but was informed that that is the normal size. I sorta confirmed it when Saturns on the supermarket were that size at $4.99-$5.99 a lb. That is crazy.
Mike.
Not very but definitely pleasant when I catch a wiff. Also it’s been
Definitely not like citrus when they are blooming.
Mike
Ok…yeah i remember your pics from last year. I have Saturn grafted onto at least 4 trees…but they are all just branches at this point. Hopefully i can get a few dozen. The ones i had last year were thinned by frost/freeze and winter…so the remaining fruit were huge.
I also have Galaxy blooming, but a borer got it so i’m not sure what is going to happen… I’ll have to either thin all the fruit or just keep a couple (potted tree).
Hey…Olpea,
Since I know you have absolutely nothing to do this time of the year, could you come over and help me figure out how to thin and prune some peaches .
.
Mike
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That is some good looking bloom Mike.
We are busy here thinning fruit, or should I say trying to thin. I keep getting distracted on other matters and am much farther behind than I’d like. Waiting now to get a tire fixed.
Only have about 20 percent of thinning done. Thinning today. Tomorrow planning to set out tomatoes, spraying for curc, etc. Very busy for sure.
I don’t know about Saturn, but TangO’s is markedly better if you thin them very far apart as grown here, IME. They are an exceptional peach when they are much larger than the ones I see in farm markets. After you’ve got a lot of trees going there is no reason not to produce the best possible fruit because on a good year there will always be more than you need. I thin Tang0’s to at least 8".
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Does the set of “twins” at each bud site count as one or two fruits.
Two years ago when I had a great harvest the hardest thing for me to do was to remove one of the “twins” from each growth site and consequently I wound up with many fruit and admittedly some were smaller than I had hoped for.
The flavor was still very good.
You know, they say that “ignorance is bliss” so I think that the “wow factor” of the strange looking new peach enthralled my family and friends.
I was a little (though very little) guilt ridden knowing that I might have produced better fruit, seeing how much they enjoyed them. I didn’t want to be a downer by telling them that these could have been better.
Well… Here’s to having the discipline and will power to doing it right this time.
Mike
I always remove twins, if we are talking about joined fruitlets. Galaxy and Saturn are very high brix-low acid peaches, so if they are on a well-let part of the tree (should all be well lit- if I was you, I’d remove more wood) they don’t need to be “premium” to be the best tasting peach ever to many palates less jaded then, say, fruitnut’s.
I generally remove doubles too (joined fruitlets). Sometimes if the tree has few fruitlets because of frost thinning, I will break off one of the doubles and let the other grow.
What I call “twins” are peaches at the same node but not joined together. In other words they aren’t like Siamese twins, but just regular twins. This is fairly common because most peach buds have a leaf bud in the middle with two flower buds on the outside at each node (or just one leaf bud at the node).
I used to try to avoid (if possible) growing both of the twins. Now I absolutely avoid it. Even if it’s a long shoot and the twins are the only fruit on the shoot, I still remove one of the twins. If both twins are left at the node, one or both fruit end up being too small to sell.
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