Yeah I’m not in favor of soil amendments in the hole, often roots trying to leave the hole circle back to the good soil, later the roots girdle. A user here posted photos of how his roots circled and stayed in the good soil. If you want to feed it more, fine, amend by mulching compost to the drip line. Not sure what the bucket would do? I tend to mound trees as high as possible. and never bury deep. This method has worked well for me.
Putting them in super good soil makes for a lot of vegetative growth, which I’m actually trying to avoid. Also fruit quality is better from trees that have to work to find water and nutrients.
I guess if you made the whole big enough you could avoid girdling. I only watched the video and I would never want peach trees that big, ever. I do not want to climb ladders to harvest fruit. I know you had frost problems, but wow, so few fruit.
Also for me I don’t need a ton of peaches. Mine produce about 80 fruits per tree I thin over 120 off the tree, and leave about 80. and are kept at 7 feet tall. Mine are now 7 years old. I also grafted many cultivars unto them so each tree produces different fruits throughout the season. I used backyard orchard culture pruning techniques to keep them small. Just yesterday I took a photo of them. If you zoom in you can see the white tags marking each cultivar.
This year I will not get that many fruits as some of the scaffolds will be cut down so that new cultivars grafted on lower more horizontal branches can become the new main scaffold.
Here is fruit off my Arctic Glo nectarine before much grafting.
PF Lucky 13 also before grafting. I should have thinned even more as yield was too high.
Indian Free peach (this tree is only 5 feet tall) It is the tree I’m closest to in the photo (first photo) I took yesterday. On the left is some home grown Yukon Gold potatoes.
I certainly would not want more peaches. And would not want to climb a ladder to get them. I just walked around the trees and harvested.My spacing is 8 feet, so you can fit a lot of 7 foot trees in a small space.
I also grow SpiceZee nectaplum. it produces some very large and delicious nectarines.
My favorite nectarine is Arctic Glo as I love the red fleshed peaches and nectarines.
To me the lack of flowers on your trees was striking. They should cover the tree completely.
Well cover the 1 year wood. Not the whole tree. Way too much vegetative growth in my opinion. The soil is too rich in nutrients.
Scaffolds only last so long. So me putting new cultivars on removing most of the old scaffolds can be considered renewal pruning. Doing that on these big trees would be tough work, if even possible? Peaches only grow on 1 year old wood, and soon on the big tree all will be unreachable. I want to keep the one year old wood at under 7 feet.
I’m in Michigan, Southeast corner, 8 miles north of Detroit. Zone 5b/6a.
I grow pluots too. Yields are less as the trees are fully grafted, and only one scaffold for any one cultivar…
Dapple Dandy and Flavor King in the center
Dapple Dandy is one big pluot!! Fantastic tasting if you ask me.
Multi grafted trees are beautiful with all the different fruit
