Need info on basic early care for 3' tall White Lady Peach Tree in NJ

Looks great! @RobCanGolf, how much sun does it get?

I’ll say between 7 and 8 hours. I would like to trim the maple that grows next to it and that would easily pick up another hour easily.


This little white lady has come a long way. Thanks to all the advice I received here!!!

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Yes, multiple trees are in the yard now.

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Are you fertilizing with anything? Ever do a soil test? Could just be that we have different varieties but I feel like your tree should have a bit more vigor after 4 years.

What’s up with the concrete pad around the base of the tree? I feel like that would be an awesome idea for a fig tree, acting as a heat sink.

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I read a recommendation for another member on here a while back on keeping trees short. The post mentioned a book on pruning fruit trees to keep them manageable without a ladder. I liked what I read and adopted that philosophy, since the tree was so young when I read the book, I think I had it for two years at the time. Notice the low crotch in the center, it’s approx. 21” high. Ideally I wanted it below 18”, however the lowest branches were above that point, so when I made that cut, I lost a lot of tree. As for the concrete pad, I built it with my oldest daughter last summer. It’s mainly meant to keep lawn fertilizer and seed away from the peach tree and keep the tree’s mulch near the tree.

I don’t think Dimitri was referring to the height of the tree. I started reading the thread top to bottom and when I saw the update pic after 4 years I too expected a monster peach tree. They do grow fast and I would expect it to grow more in 4 years. Do you give it any fertilizer? Experienced growers here have told me to give my young trees urea after establishing. I’ve had great growth with fertilizer, mulch and water during dry times.

I have problems getting my trees to grow due to clay soil. I have some that after 4 years look similar to your picture. In my yard I would consider the tree to be stunted. I also have some that are easily 8 to 10 times the size of main caliper in your pic (after 4 years). The trick I found to eliminating runting was planting in 4ft x 4ft raised boxes 10 to 12 inches deep filled with mixed soil. And as Susu mentioned, fertilize. I fertilize after the first month in the ground, some do it immediately - many of the nurseries will tell you not to fertilize the first year. I have never had any damage fertilizing the first year.

I have dug up a fair number of trees that size/age and you will likely find the roots have not grown since you planted the tree or very little. I have two more to dig up this year if they do not grow that I planted in a hill side without boxes.

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Yeah, I’m sorry Rob, but I agree with the others. There is something wrong with that planting site or the tree.

I have some peach trees in my backyard and just stepped out and snapped a photo of a two year old peach tree. Trunk is about 1.5 inches in diameter. By year 4 (after four seasons in the ground) I expect the trunk size to be about 3" in diameter and to have a canopy diameter of about 12’. Four year trees should give about 100 fruit.

The toilet paper is just for size reference. :wink:

If your issue isn’t borers, I suspect it may have something to do with too much water. Peach trees really don’t like soil the least bit over wet. If you dig down about a foot during the springtime, when the ground is normally saturated with water, and see water in the bottom of the hole, that’s too wet.

Hand watering in the summer may exacerbate the problem. I’d also get rid of the concrete (although it does look attractive). Peach trees don’t do well with concrete over their roots. Ultimately if you could could plant your next peach tree in a mound, I have a strong suspicion it would do much better.

Btw, my tree needs pruned badly. It shouldn’t have all those random shoots coming off the trunk. I’ll prune those back when we start pruning this spring.

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I have a sand based soil and haven’t watered it since the year after I lopped it in half. I knew I was taking a risk that year, and that it would basically bring the tree back to year one. Essentially making a 3-4year old tree a 1 year old. Notice in the first year’s pic, the height of the tree. That is all central leader. The following year, I did normal maintenance. There was peaches on the tree that year. The ensuing winter,I chopped it to the lowest branch. Lost all new growth, and all development, but felt confident it would all come back. The following year the tree developed, and I pruned it accordingly. Last year, it had ten peaches. This year, I counted over 30 Blossoms so far. I have not fertilized this tree. Last year’s fruit development went pretty good. This year, I’ll thin the fruit and see how we do. I appreciate the input, we’ll see what this year brings and hopefully get her looking like yours. Thanks for the compliment on the concrete. We put it in last summer/fall.

If you had to prune it that hard, perhaps that explains part of the issue. We generally remove about 50% of the wood on a new tree each time we prune and we prune our young peach trees twice a year, sometimes three times.

One way to measure if you have good growth on a young tree is that if you don’t prune during the season, you should get some straight up shoots that grow 4 or 5 feet. Once a tree large and starts fruiting heavily, ideally you’ll get a lot of new shoots with about 18" of growth, but a few water spouts which will grow 4 or 5 feet straight up if unpruned during the summer.

I go hard with the summer pruning. The waterspouts don’t stand a chance. Generally throughout the year, cut back 1/3 to 2/3, sometimes all of new growth. That mainly depends on the branch and how it affects the overall shape of the tree. The main goal is an low(under 8’) open center tree. So those branches that angle towards the center, they disappear 100%. After the winter pruning, when I do shaping, there is a lot of lost new growth, due to that factor alone.

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For anyone interested in how we prune, I was out in the backyard and pruned a couple trees. Here’s a before and after pic of the tree pictured above. I let it get too tall this summer, so had to take quite a bit off.

It probably would have had about 100 flower buds on it. I cut just about all them off. Now it only has enough wood to raise about 8 peaches. It’s a sacrifice made to build a good tree.

Here’s another before pic:

Here is the after:

The tree will put on a lot of foliage and now start putting more energy into developing a good three branch scaffold system.

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Mark,
No wonder I can never prune well, too greedy for most fruit possible :grin:

Thanks for the great side by side pics.

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Now that’s brutal :open_mouth:
Looking at that I think I need to prune my Contender a bit more. I’m also very greedy for fruit. In some cases I think “I’ll keep this branch just this year to get some fruit and then next year take it out after the rest of the tree start producing”.

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Actually Susu, a lot of times you can get away with that. Especially if the tree is an early fruiting variety. You can let it fruit on some shoots you don’t want to keep, then prune them off before they start shading anything you want to keep and develop.

We don’t do that because it’s just easier to manage lots of trees as a herd, instead of as individuals. So we go through and prune all the first year trees the same way, the second year trees the same way, etc. Labor becomes a pretty big deal when you have to pay for it. We just resign ourselves we aren’t going to start getting any real fruit from a tree till the third year.

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I like that a lot

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How old is the tree in the background?

That peach tree has been in the ground 8 seasons (This summer will be it’s 9th.)

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There was a notification to me that someone watched this thread. As such, I finally got some time to post an update to possibly assist someone in pruning their peaches to an open vase.

A couple weeks ago I took a photo before bloom, tried to take the photo at the same angle to show what the tree looks like a couple years later.

Keep in mind this is a Contender peach tree which grows straight up. That makes things harder because, unless one ties down scaffolds (which I don’t have time to do anymore) it requires a lot more pruning on young trees to get them to branch horizontally.

As such they take about a year longer (or more) to get into production. This tree is now in it’s fourth season.

Here is a pic of the tree in bloom a few days ago:

I actually pruned the tree a little bit before the pic to straighten it up. It would normally produce maybe 75 good quality peaches after thinning. This year has been been horrible spring weather, so we don’t expect much. But the pruning through the years may help fellow peach enthusiasts. Contender takes about three prunings per summer train it to horizontal.

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