I live in Canada, next to Montreal, in zone 5 b. I’m looking to choose an grow some peaches in my back yard. I already have PF-24C and Saturn the donut peach since 2 years now ; I had fruits on both this summer.
I’m don’t know which of these varieties would be worth trying?
If spring comes all at once you may have better luck than many further south, although i think you should of course focus on late blooming frost resistant varieties. I very much enjoy Contender and Intrepid although they are close in ripening dates. I always hear great stuff about Veteran, Raritan rose looks nice Polly has been a successful white peach for me, I assume Indian free would be too late for you to ripen and i have not grown any nectarines but i think about the arctic series as i hear they are cold hardy.
I’m in 5b/6a and it’s warm enough for any of them. I get fruit most years. About 1 time in 10 years looking at historical records does it become cold enough to damage fruit buds. I can live with that. I have harvested for 7 years and didn’t get fruit one year. The year the polar vortex dipped down and stayed a bit in Michigan.
I grow nectarines too, Two that were bred on the west coast Arctic Glo and Spice Zee Nectaplum. I love both a lot!
Spice Zee Nectaplum took a few years to develop full flavor. It’s a huge nectarine.
It’s a white so low acid. Excellent flavor though!
Arctic Glo is the other extreme an acid bomb with hints of cranberry or rhubarb flavor
I added a couple more nectarines as grafts. Still small so no fruit yet. Fantasia and Arctic Jay. Fantasia will have a few this year. I’m moving more toward nectarines than peaches. Although one excellent yellow like Red Haven is a must.
And I also enjoy Indian Free at lot. Short shelf life though. My favorite peach so far.
I have grown plants most of my life, so I can make it look easy when it is not.
Definitely try Contender, and Veteran, Raritan Rose is a very good white peach with a red blush.
Give it a shot, the worst that can happen is they die.
FK did well, I only had a few DD last year. A couple plums/pluots flowered in heavy rains and were not pollinated well. So I had a light crop last year. Flavor King did well anyway.
Of the ones you mention, I’ve grown all of them except PF-11 and Empress peach.
Raritan Rose was an inconsistent producer for me in cold winters although most years it came through winters and spring with a full crop.
PF24c hasn’t been as good for me as it has for others. I just have a couple trees of them as a trial. Last year was the first year they produced a full crop. Maybe they just take longer than most to get going.
Veteran is a good hardy peach.
Harrow Diamond is a hardy peach. Fruits heavily every year. It’s almost as good as Earlystar in taste, but not quite. I have been planting more Earlystar in my orchard for this reason. Still for your area, I might suggest Harrow Diamond over Earlystar because your winters are colder.
Here, Contender produces like crazy, no matter the winter conditions.
Hardired also produces like crazy. The fruit must be thinned very heavily, or you get really small not very sweet fruit. It sets about a billion fruit, like Saturn. Otherwise it’s a pretty decent nectarine.
I have been looking at nectarines a lot and I keep finding the west coast Fantasia to beat out the others. So I went with that one for a good yellow nectarine. I added as a graft and it grew better than almost all other peach and nectarine grafts I did that year. The tree is very vigorous. I’ll let it have a couple this year, but I want it to grow into a full scaffold. It only going to take 3 years for it to fill out completely. @Jwsemo Suggested Arctic Jay and Fantasia and I added both 2 years ago. Thanks Jason for the advice! Jason is in zone 6b. They both were easy to graft for nectarines.
I kept looking for first hand comments on Fantasia. I found this
I had 5 peach trees (including 2 called Fantasia, which is classified as a Nectarine, but tasted like an “out of this world peach”.
And this
Our family far prefers nectarines to peaches. If I could get better peach varieties in Canada then that could change but for now I only find Frost Peach on both combo trees and individual trees. In contrast I have Fantasia, Independence and HardiRed nectarines growing in my Urban Orchard. 1 peach vs 7 nectarine trees makes it easy to tell our favourite. I’m actually very tempted to pick up a second Fantasia as my fruit tree #50.
Anthony
So out of the nectarines Anthony picked Fantasia to have two trees of.
Alan said this Probably my most consistent non-cracking (most seasons) nectarine is Red-gold. Fantasia may end up being my favorite in a few years, though.
Although all reviews were not positive. It seems to attract brown rot. But here none of my fruits get much rot if any at all. One or two at most. Most years zero brown rot.
West coast fruits in general are not tested for brown rot as it is not a problem in California. So if you have rot problems, best go with another cultivar.
Thanks for posting those vids. Looks like you are growing some delicious looking fruits there.
It’s a sidebar note, but we pick peaches a bit differently than your vids. Sometimes by turning the peach on the shoot, as you do in your vids, the shoulders of the peach will bruise or tear (especially if they are big peaches).
Many times the shoulders of the peach will grow above the shoot. So by turning the peach, the shoulder interferes with the shoot. In that case, if the peach is soft, the shoulder will bruise, or sometimes tear the skin.
I train my pickers to roll the peach up and around the shoot. That is, grab the bottom of the peach, lift it, and roll it around the axis of the shoot, as if the peach were orbiting around the shoot.
This seems to cause the least pick damage for soft peaches. I also teach them you can grab the shoot and just pull the peach straight down, without any rotation. However this sometimes breaks the shoot. But with vigorous trees, it doesn’t matter if some shoots get broken during harvest. The trees put on a lot more shoots than they need anyway.
For small peaches, or if the peaches are hard, it doesn’t matter so much. The shoulder doesn’t get damaged no matter how the peach is picked.
