Does Pruning Accelerate the Bloom Date of Peaches

General Fruit Growing
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Well, a forum member with lots of common sense and peach experience expressed confidence it does so this year I experimented. As soon as I was confident that extreme cold was finished I started pruning half of my peach trees, leaving every other one untouched in my orchard until today. I did this in one section of my nursery and orchard in the first week of March, and proceeded to the two other sections where I have peaches through the month, leaving every other peach alone until today.

I have same varieties side by side and pruned and unpruned trees are at identical stages of development, blossoms either just starting to open or a few days away, depending on variety, BUT NOT on whether they have been pruned or not.

What does this prove? Nothing- it merely suggests that pruning has no influence on bloom times, but it is one orchard and one season.

I just figured if pruning tends to accelerate bloom I would have encountered warning in the literature, which I haven’t, or at least don’t remember it. I also figured I would have noticed clients orchards blooming earlier than mine- my peach trees tend to be the last to be pruned and are often in full bloom when I prune them. It would be hard for me not to notice when I’m putting down oil and fungicide at many orchards at the perfect time for evaluation. I especially notice it these days as peach scale has appeared in our region and I now like to include the peaches in the oil app. If flowers are too far along I won’t spray oil.

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Thanks for doing that experiment Alan.

We talked about it in this thread:

As I mentioned then, I’d never experienced it, just read about it. Glad you had time to do the experiment. I’ll accept your anecdotal experiment as evidence that pruning really doesn’t advance bloom. Good to know.

As I mentioned in the thread, I think pruning peach during bloom does decrease the hardiness of flowers.

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Fortunately, by bloom, hard frost is usually done here.

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Just to add a data point – I’ve never heard of such a thing.

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An experience with cherry, not peach:

I pruned my royal lee as soon as I started seeing bud swell, Minnie royal was already showing a touch of green, and ended up getting it to bloom before Minnie royal, instead of after like the last few years. We had already received 650hrs of chill, and the hot days between fronts were approaching 80s (don’t know if that last bit adds anything, just wanted to throw it in as variables).

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