There is no peaches or nectarines this year for me.
We had mild Dec, Jan and most of Feb except for a few cold nights esp, one night of -8 in early Feb.
Freckle Face and September Free, the trees, have survived well and started to leaf out now. This is the way it is here in my zone 6. We win some, we lose some. I am on to apples and pears (for this year).
Don’t forget your persimmons. They are all should be good still.
I still have blooms and don’t see any brown inside. I’m still not fully confident. Anyway, I’m sorry you got skunked. Seems like weather round here is getting a little too erratic. Here it was just that one day in Feb when it got down to about -7F in my area. Used to be that wasn’t cause for concern, but the overall winter was so mild that the trees weren’t fully hardened off even though it was mid-winter.
Great information! Powdery Mildew is something I fight here in Spokane that most people on this site don’t seem to have much problem with.
@EDLO Thanks for sharing your list. Some very interesting varieties to research. I’m out in the northeast, hope to try a few out at some point. Do you have any advice on your standout nectarines/stone fruit that are hardy-I’m in zone 5. I notice a lot of them are listed online as zone 6, i think my area has been on the warmer side past few years so some might possibly work.
I also saw you listed both october sugar/snow and you noted you were “sure is only for zone 9”, the tomorrows harvest listing for them says zone 5-8, which one is right?
I’ve never seen powdery mildew on stonefruit here in NY and only very rarely on any apple trees. It has never been an important issue except on gooseberries here.
Thanks for pointing that out. I will correct that today. The late season peaches and nectarines that Burchell offers are really special, but i don’t think they are suited for zone 7 down because of the shorter season. Even in California theses October ripening selections can have problems from too much heat in September, right when they are beginning to ripen, which results in cracking. None the less they are very tasty.
I inherited the website and have been doing my best to clean up the content. Please point out any odd or questionable text as I have not caught everything yet.
The latest to ripen here, about 40 miles N. of NYC, I’ve tried is Victoria, which is a nice peach as grown here, besides Indian Free and another heirloom white whose name escapes me at the moment, one best for cooking (I used to grow it).
We need some great flavored high chill, late bloom apricots.
Bummer! Read this whole thread-a few of them really do sound special. Glad to learn about your site, I will certainly be on the lookout in the future for interesting stuff that might work in my zone.
The one that most fits the bill that I’ve grown is Sugar Pearls but Harstar looks promising. Harstar trees out in the open in my nursery have some flower buds while other varieties were frozen out. As it performs here, Sugar Pearls is the sweetest cot I’ve tasted and has acid with that sugar and the cot texture I love. Scott says it’s bland at his sight further south though.
Do you have any experience with the Tomcot. I hear positive reviews on its zone 5 performance from time to time. I know it’s very dependable up to zone 7 personally.
I have Tomcot growing against a southern wall of my house. Every flower bud was frozen this year while Sugar Pearls looks to have enough flowers to set a full crop, if the ovaries survived as the flowers did. They are side to side with overlapping branches against the wall, but he Tomcot flowers were clearly destroyed immediately following a negative zero freeze event. The fruit is large, nice and early but a bit dry lacking optimum cot texture. It doesn’t sauce up the way most apricots do with very little stove time.
I bet you are thinking of Heath Cling. I’ve got a couple trees of it- one at home and another at a rental. Shockingly, it was already there when I bought the place. Unlabeled, but clearly HC.
I normally pick it in the first week of October. Cling, but a nice dense tropical flavor which I like a lot. I just use it for fresh eating.
Carnival is the other late peach I’ve liked a lot. But, I only got a decent sample for a couple years. It has since been very non-productive, either through late frost, brown rot, animals swiping them, insect, etc. Always something.
It can be hit or miss, but I really like the late season peaches. Ideally, I’d like to find something that ripens a few weeks after Heath Cling. Maybe the 3rd week of October, as I generally get first frost around Oct 31. This past year it was a week or two into November.
I bought this one in Sept 2017, but back then it was described as “early October”, not the July it is described as now on the site. Alas, it died after during the 2nd winter and I never got a chance to sample it.
I picked up Snack Time and Pink Diamond trees a few years ago at Costco and am glad to see them on your list. Hopefully I can sample them soon.
I hit about 0F that night. Hopefully it doesn’t impact things too much. I’ve also gotten down to 28-30 several times during bloom, which could have thinned things a bit. But when I look at the trees, I seem to have a decent amount of bloom. I haven’t checked to see if they are viable though.
Yes, I had forgotten it because I personally found it very forgettable and I know you like it because you tasted it first from my tree. Fortunately for me, it died. I like Indian Free so much more.
I wonder how common is a fondness for the taste of HC off the tree. It does get up some sugar but no acid, as I recall.
Carnival wood I’ve gotten from you didn’t take. Have you not tried Victoria. For being so late it’s quite good in a conventional peach way.
White Heath is a Early ripening selection in California. The Pumpkin Spice is really a mis-named variety if capturing the season was the intent of the name. It really is the color of the flesh that has not prompted me to want to change the name. It is really a pumpkin color, with a spicy flavored flesh. But its late June to Early July ripening date leaves it sometime before fall.
September Free has deep orange flesh, very pretty, IMO. Unfortunately, it ripens late (can’t remember late Sept or some time in Oct, by then, we don’t really has any heat. The texture of the flesh was “chewey/rubbery” and it did not have the sweetness Freckle Face has.
It must be a different variety than Heath cling then.
Oh, sorry that was not supposed to be White Heath, rather Pumpkin Spice and is an early mid season
variety. White heath is a Early to mid September selection in the central valley
Not odd or questionable text, but something that I really miss on the Tomorrow’s Harvest site when it comes to peach and nectarine descriptions is the plus or minus Redhaven harvest times. It takes a lot of interpretation for me to figure out when a variety that harvests in June in California will harvest 110 miles from the Canadian border.