Hi, all. My peach trees are having hard time of pushing the leafs out. Reliance is supposed to be hardy but it looks like a dead tree , well, not completely dead yet, still have some leafs here and there to show it is still alive when look closer. July Elberta is doing little better , but by not much…
My question is
1)when I graft peach scions onto the trees later, will the scions grow better, assuming the grafts took? Since all stored tree energy has no own leafs to push out and here comes a borrowed leaf buds of grafted scion woods，so the tree try to recover from winter injury by using all the energy on all the buds?
2)Will this extra energy the tree has helps the grafting taking rate too? maybe? Anyone knows?
Where are you located and how cold was your winter? Just asking as I had -23 degrees. Normally if I hit -18 I have damage to the peach tree and few or no fruit bud survival. So far this year I am pleasantly surprised that my peaches are leafing out. Not sure yet on fruit buds as I am in southern WI and it is a cold late spring here.
Perhaps your issue is winter cold injury? Just tossing it out as a possibility as lots of winter injury on many plants in my area this spring (Rhododendrons, burning bush, hardy shrub roses ect). I am worried about my grapes as the vines looked vine in March when I pruned but now the wood has turned a really light color and looks winter damaged.
I am outside of Chicago. I definitely think it is winter injury.
Interesting thing is a grafted branch of Intrepid which also claimed winter hardy only has 5,6 leaf buds pushed out. On the other hand. One of my unknown seeding peach pushed all the leafs out on its branches. Not very hardy cultivars such as Red Baron, Indian Free has pushed more leafs ( about 70% of the leafs) than these known winter hardy ones.