My 3 peach trees were loaded with buds a few weeks ago when I was pruning them. Now here we are in April and they still haven’t bloomed except for a couple I thought were just ahead of schedule.
Is it too late? My mom’s peach tree a few miles away is doing the same thing.
Why is your profile hidden? If we do not know what zone you live in, or your state, we cannot answer a question/help.
Sorry, I forgot to include that. I am in zone 6, St. Louis, Missouri.
If I had to guess, it sounds like it’s weather related.
Here’s the March history for St Louis. There was some colder days last week that might have made the tree a little shy.
I guess, your trees got hit by freezing cold weather since Feb. March 20 on that chart was bad, too.
We had a warm winter until early Feb when temp dropped to - 8 F. Yo-yo temp is worse than steadily cold.
Anyhow, peach flower buds don’t tolerate temp below 20 F esp. if they start to come out of dormancy.
By “shy” do you mean they are being slower to bloom or do you mean they won’t be blooming at all? This really sucks because I had 250 peaches from just one tree last year and the other two would’ve fruited for the first time.
My mom said a couple years ago she was going to cut down her Redhaven because of diseases year after year but I got it bouncing back looking great last year and now no fruit at all this year? It’s a goner.
What I mean is I observe trees grow really nicely with spring warmth, but a cold spell could also pump the breaks on growth and make the trees “shy”.
I gathered the courage to pick off a few buds and rolled them in my fingers and they just crumbled. I’m just beside myself that they are all dead. At least 300 peaches just poof and gone.
Yeah, that does suck! Unfortunately, peaches and many other stone fruits are especially prone to this. So far, it’s looking like I won’t get a crop this year, either. Going into the fall, it looked like this was going to be the year the peaches and apricots hit their stride. At least there’s always next year to look forward to!
The upshot is it breaks pest and disease cycles so that when they do fruit, you tend to get high quality with minimal (or no) inputs. Around 10-12 yrs ago, we were hit with a hard frost May 30 and another June 2. Fruit crops were annihilated, but it setup a cycle where apples in particular would set HUGE beautiful crops every other year. They’d overbear, and not set any flower buds for the following year, keeping pests and disease to a minimum. We pressed massive amounts of cider on those fruitful years. Annual bearing makes plenty of sense economically, and it terms of convenience, but biennial bearing is a lot easier to sustain. Peaches are easy enough to grow organically here, the only real issue being brown rot, which is endemic on native Prunus. We only get a good crop every 2-3 years though. Flower buds generally getting nipped by winter lows or fluctuating temps the rest of the time.
The buds look dead. Undoubtedly very low temps at night into morning. All it takes is one or two really 
freezingbtemps.
A lot of my peachs did that this year as well from the cold, im about 1.5 hours away from St Louis in southern IL.
You will get used to it. Growing peaches, nectarines, plums in colder zones are not for fainted hearts. Sometimes, you win, sometimes you lose.
Mother Nature always win.
Amen to that statement. I knew when I planted my peach trees it was a big gamble, just like you said. Some years I get a lot of nice fruit, most years I just a nice green tree to look at.
My peach trees did exactly like jeremy has done. They look absolutely dead. I sprayed my other fruit trees yesterday. I looked at my 4 peach trees and they looked like they were still in the middle of the winter. Actually I had about 4 peach blossoms that were open, no leaves at all showing at the tips. I had thought I was going to have to call the guy I use to come and cut them down and take out the rootstocks. I guess I will wait on that. They look horrible.
