@drewk Since you sounded a bit pessimistic about growing peaches in Middle TN, I wanted to show you one of my harvests last year. They aren’t the biggest or most perfect peaches, but it does show what is possible right here in our area.
BTW…I forgot to address your question about Brown Rot. For 3 years I had very little of it, but this year it arrived In force and completely wiped out every single piece of fruit on some trees. But I didn’t spray for it. Hopefully this year I’ll keep it at bay.
Hey welcome Drew, what a great name! 
Glad to see you here. If you research the site you will find loads of info on how to fight brown rot.
@thecityman Blackberries are tough, I agree with your assessment. I have found if you let them hang till the calyx is brown and crumbly they are at their sweetest. The berry should fall off, if you have to pull it’s not ripe.
the sweetest I have found are tayberries. They too have to hang a bit. When I made a smoothie of them for my wife she thought they were strawberries. It is a raspberry-blackberry hybrid and it tastes more like a raspberry than blackberry.
Yet the taste is not a raspberry, unique strawberry-like. Only Loganberry is like that too, although I heard the flavor is bland. Not so with tayberries, delicious!
I removed most of my cultivars this fall. I kept tayberries, wyeberries, New Berry, Marion, Boysenberry and Darrow, an old east coast traditional blackberry that is winter hardy for breeding. New Berry to me is the best blackberry as it has hints of raspberry flavor, not like tayberry though. It is sour till fully ripe.
A wyeberry is a larger boysenberry type. I like both of these for jam, not fresh eating. They are tart but have an excellent flavor for leather, syrup, jam, and vodka infusions.
The problem with my choices is they are all trailing (except Darrow) so need a trellis for sure, and all of them have wicked thorns. I went strictly on flavor.Seems I like the flavor of trailing thorny blackberries.
I got rid of 6 or 7 thornless cultivars. They are OK fully ripe, but to me they have an after taste I do not like at all. Loch Ness was very sweet, but I got sick of them easy. Fully ripe they are very sweet. Good production too. Still the taste had no wow factor, unlike all I kept that certainly do have a wow factor if picked ripe. If picked under ripe, nothing special.
Thanks for all of the great info!
I didnt mean to come off as pessimistic, we has peach trees as a kid and rarely do I remember anyone spraying them or anything apart from trying to keep deer away. The biggest threat to them seemed to be deer. No idea what variety they were though.
The contender definitely seems like a great one to try along with a Red Haven. I’ll have to pick a 3rd variety too - I may do an Elberta as I’m sure there is some reason that a majority of commercial peaches in GA/SC are this variety.
Any suggestions on recommended nurseries or ones to avoid?
Is it fine to plant them in the winter so that they can become acclimated and begin to grow healthily in the spring?
Great harvest there! That just makes me crave some peaches even more…
Cityman,
I looked on your profile (amazing amount of fruit cultivars btw - 20 varieties of peaches/nects, holy cow, you are becoming a regular peach aficionado)
Anyway I noticed the blackberries you’ve grown. I’ve tried all of those (the Chesters I haven’t grown myself but have tried them from another local blackberry grower). Imo, most of those aren’t the sweetest (although Apache is pretty good to me, if picked dead ripe). The others aren’t worth growing, imo.
My favorite is Triple Crown. It’s not quite as big as Apache, but sweeter. I’ve also found Triple Crown very competitive against weeds. I do use Sinbar as a pre-emergent, but they are still very competitive where I don’t use Sinbar (here at the house). They are crazy vigorous.
They probably aren’t as sweet as some of the ones Drew mentioned, but I think all of those are trailing types (as Drew mentioned - plus thorns don’t work for my application) and probably wouldn’t be hardy at my location.
Here’s a pic of Triple Crown I took last summer, 2016 (grass needs mowed but the berries were fairly clean).
Here’s a closer pic I took this summer.
I keep them pruned to about 3 to 4’. They fill in fairly quickly and dense. These get the Sinbar treatment, but the ones at the house don’t look too bad (without Sinbar).
I’ll admit though, blackberries in general aren’t as sweet as peaches.
Wow! Nicely done Kevin.
Hey Drew…good to hear from you. I should have expected that you’d have some good advice on Blackberries and you did! But more importantly, you now have me excited about Tayberries and I’ll probably try them on your recommendation alone. I’ve seen them around (on-line I mean) and wondered how they were. IF you, with your brambles experience, think they are that good then they are certainly worth a try. I actually planted some Loganberries that I got at Tractor Supply last year but like many of the plants I get from TS, they died. I applaud TS for offering a surprising variety of interesting fruit and nuts (hazelnuts, chestnut (seedlings), pecan (seedlings) etc.) But the packaging techniques they use the extremely small size of many of the plants they pack into sawdust and then a plastic bag, and so on dooms many of their plants from the start. But I digress. I’m also very interested in the fact that it sounds like you, overall, prefer the berries that come from thorny plants vs those from thornless plants. I’ have tasted blackberries from many other places (friends/famly, neighbors, and local u-pick places) and I had already formed a personal opinion that (ON AVERAGE) thorny plants just have better tasting black berries. No doubt there are exceptions to this rule and I don’t have experience with huge numbers of different plants, but hearing you confirm my own experience is just really interesting to me. I will also tell you that here in my area, I find the taste of wild black-berries to be better than most if not all of the “tame” blackberries I’ve tasted. In fact, as you may recall, I spent about 3 years creating my own wild blackberry patch by digging up and transplanting a few wild plants from a wild patch that was especially good tasting. Considering the way wild patches spread on their own, I was very surprised to find my transplants took a VERY long time (years) before they really began to send a lot of runners and shoots starting coming up. Worse yet, I really never get my transplants to bloom or produce fruit…even the third year, when they were sending up lots of shoots. I ended up with a big patch of thorns but that was all…never got a single berry. I don’t know enough about Brambles to know, but is it possible that I dug up all males and so their runners and shoots simply made more males that don’t blom? Or does it even work like that? (ie do only females produce fruit, or are there even male/females? If not, any idea why my wild patch, even after it became healthy with a lot of new plants that emerged from my transplants, never fruited? Once again…though…I’m chasing down another rabbit trail here. Same old Kevin! ha
@Olpea always a honor to hear from the king of peaches, and your compliment on my variety means everything to me. That being said, I always feel a little like my list of varieties paints an unfair picture of what I have in my orchard. Don’t misunderstand me, I absolutely have every single tree on my list in my orchard. But many of them (majority, in fact) are either this year or last year, so they are very small trees. Worse yet, several trees on my list have some sort of problem that means they are small, spindly little trees. In short, I don’t want you or anyone else who read’s my list to have visions of my orchard being filled with large, healthy, well pruned and shaped trees that are ready to produce bushels and bushels of fruit. That is my goal, of course, but I just feel compelled to tell you and others that I’m not there yet, not by a long shot. Speaking of which, can you shed any light to why I have had such bad luck with late season peach trees. It has to be more than bad luck. I’m talking primarily about Indian Free and Fairtime and one other very late variety I tried a few years ago and can’t remember right now (it died). I’ve planted and/or replanted these 2-3 varieties several times and had them die or just look awful and refuse to put on hardly any growth. I’ve planted them at different locations all around my property in the same conditions- and usually within feet of other peach trees that are healthy. Before you or others can help me much you’ll probably need to know the root stocks. Unfortunately (CRINGE) I don’t know. I bought most of the problematic late season trees from Peaceful Valley/Grow Organic or Stark Brothers. Not sure what either uses for RS. But I bought lots of my other trees from the same people and at the same time in many cases. Yet my late season varieties just do awful. Can you imagine anything inherently different about late season trees that could explain why I’ve had such (repeated) bad luck with varieties like Indian Free and Fairtime and another late peach??? Or do you think I’ve just had some coincidental bad luck with a few trees that just happened to be late fruiting varieties?
@drewk Since we are still talking about “peaches in Middle TN” I hope you don’t feel like I’ve hijacked your thread here. BTW…did you ever tell me what county you are in? If I missed it then I’m sorry, but I’m curious to know how close we really are. Let me at least try to answer your questions:
If you haven’t seen it, @scottfsmith has assembled an amazing and incredibly helpful list on on-line nurseries. If you are not yet aware of this list, you’ll be thrilled when you see it. Here it is:
http://growingfruit.org/t/nurseries-list
As for your question about whether there are any nurseries to avoid, you might get different people to suggest one or two nurseries with which they have had bad experience with or don’t like or trust their trees. But there is one SUPER-STAR when it comes to the list of nurseries to avoid! There is one on-line retailer that, when I mention its name, is sure to get a lot of “Amen’s” and “I agree” and “LIKES”. It also happens to be one of the most advertised on-line nurseries out there (albeit with the strangest ads I’ve ever seen) The infamous offender of which I speak is: Ty Ty The depth of their awful reputation cannot be overstated. If you were on a desert island and the only way you could avoid starving to death was to (somehow) order a fruit tree from Ty Ty, I would recommend you just start eating sand. haha.
Finally, I concur with your inclination to buy and plant an Elberta peach tree. You mentioned it in conjunction with red haven and contender. In my own limited experience, those 3 trees would be the absolutely perfect for this area and are probably the 3 that I have the most success with. Hope some of this helps. Good luck!
Kevin
As far as blackberries go, I’m planning next year on planting Triple Crown, PrimeArk Freedom and maybe Traveler, and Ouachita and Osage. All but the TC are thornless offerings from U of Ark and are supposed to be sweeter than some of their other thornless. I know Ouachita hasn’t been tasty for you, but maybe they’ll be OK here.
I also want to give Marion blackberry a shot here, even tho it might not take kindly to both the heat and sometimes hard winters here. Folks seem to really like it, but it is a Western BB, and may have some issues here in the East.
Opposite here, our wild BB are way too sour for my taste. They have to almost fall off the vine before they’re even decent tasting to me. My wife likes them, but she grew up on this farm eating them, so she may not have a lot to compare to. She also loves black walnuts which we have in abundance here, but I just don’t care for them.
If you click on his icon, it says Nashville, so I guess Davidson county?
Cityman,
Off the top of my head, I can’t think why you’ve had such poor results with late peach varieties. I had some trouble with bac. spot when growing Indian Free, but it still seemed to have normal vigor. You are absolutely right that there is a possibility the rootstock could be related.
I don’t think it’s related to the harvest window of the peach, or the variety. Although I’ve not grown Fairtime, I recognize it is a cultivar well suited to your climate. I’ve grown lots of late varieties. Currently I’m growing a very late variety, Autumn Prince, which ripens after Fairtime. Although they are only one year old trees, I’ve not seen any problems with them, or other late varieties.
For me, just about every single peach tree I’ve ever lost has to do with wet roots. I even lost some new trees this summer. They just died. I had them planted in terraces so I was really puzzled how I lost these buggers. The terraces were a little shallow (i.e. low) and planted in the wettest part of the orchard, but I thought the terraces would surely protect the peaches. However, when I pulled the dead peach trees up, I saw the roots were really in mud (We had so much rain this summer. Once had 7" in 24 hours.)
I ended up moving more dirt where those trees were so close to the normal soil line.
I’m sure you’ve checked for borers, wallowed out trees, crown gall, etc. The only other thing I can think of is possible ground contamination with herbicide, or some disease. There are diseases which can kill or weaken peaches, which don’t get discussed much on the forum. Everything from root disease Armillaria to X disease (i.e. A to Z, or, well, A to X) and lots in between.
It’s possible you could also have nematodes, but I think it unlikely since you are not seeing the symptoms in other trees.
I know I’m not much help here, but the first thing I would check is soggy roots, then I might start looking at diseases, if the trees are on a halfway normal rootstock (and not on some weird dwarfing roostock like sand cherry).
I know some need pollen from other plants, not self fertile. This is always tested with new cultivars. Pete Tallman who developed the Niwot primocane fruitng black raspberry was kind enough to help me out in my breeding experiments with advice, tutorials on bramble breeding, and even seeds. Great guy! Niwot is his 2nd child, his first was not self fertile and after years of testing and a huge amount of money was scrapped when they discovered this.
I’m at a loss as to why your wilds didn’t perform? It makes no sense? A guess would be viral infection. When you have decreases in harvest that is the first thing to look at. Mostly because you cannot do nothing about it, so one needs to determine if the problem is fixable or not? It might be best to grab more and plant them elsewhere.
Triple Crown is a winner, it is one of the best thornless types. I found though the darn thing suckers like crazy. Which is fine in a commercial setting but when it sends up canes next to my black raspberries in my postage stamp yard, not cool. It is a great thornless, but like all thornless it still is not there for me. I put the thornless in for my wife who loves blackberries, but she has developed a problem with acid fruits, unable to consume many anymore. I’m like you Kevin, not my favorite fruit. So they had to go. I removed Triple Crown. The raw juice was amazing and very good. I found as a flavoring blackberries are very good. Still fruit I like more is out there and in it’s place is honeyberries and serviceberries. I only put two cultivars of honeyberries in, but they are in the super sweet category Sweeter than the U of S cultivars.
Stone fruit was king of the fruits this year for me with an amazing pluot and plum harvest on top of a great peach and nectarine harvest was by far the star this year of all my fruit. I gave away much of it and that is always fun. Especially when you have nice looking fruit, and I did. I don’t really grow for anybody but my family, it still though was very enjoyable to give it away. I didn’t think it would be, I was wrong.
Agreed, you want to start with proven winners, then work your way to the more marginal choices that could be risky. This way you always get some harvest.
@drewk, please keep us updated from time to time on how it’s going!
Us stone fruit growers need to bounce feedback off of each other! Not easy plants to grow!
Peaches grow exceptionally well in TN. Your biggest problem is late spring frosts (after mild winters) freezing out the fruiting buds-- resulting in crop loss.
You’ll want to start with Redhaven, Contender, and Madison. All cold-hardy yellows.
Contender tastes good. Redhaven is exceptional. Some people think Redhaven is overrated. In my opinion, it is not overrated.
I have not tried Madison yet, but one Pennsylvania Amish farmer whose opinion I value highly says it fruits when ALL others get froze out. (says Amos Fisher of White Oak Nursery, Strasburg).
Grandpa Orchard of Michigan is selling all 3 right now:
https://www.grandpasorchard.com/Tree-Type/Peach-Varieties
I believe White Oak is also selling all 3 right now (at more affordable prices), but you have to call or write them-- search this forum’s “Nurseries” thread for their contact info.
Schlabach of upstate New York also sells all 3 varieties. Another Amish nursery with no website. Write for their catalog. See “Nurseries” page for more info.
Here are photos of my catalogs where you can find their addresses and voice-mailboxes:
You know, it is so nice to hear that simple admonition once in a while and I appreciate you saying it. Honestly, I think we all forget that and it is nice to be reminded that growing stone fruits really is a bit of a challenge from day one to harvest time. Maybe I’m just patting all of us on the back a little too much, but I don’t think so. We are all so accustomed to dealing with all the issues surrounding them that we sort of take them for granted-but think about it. Getting good fruit often requires a lot of research work before we even buy a tree, making sure we get something suited to our geographic area and climate (something the big box stores and beginning growers often don’t consider). Then we have to plant them at the right time of year and/or keep them watered. Proper pruning starts almost immediately and can be quite difficult to learn how to do exactly right, then it has to be continued for whole life of life of the tree! Then comes the research, selection, and use of all the proper insect and disease control sprays/additives- be it organic or non-organic. We spray one concoction in winter, and different things different times all spring and summer. We wrestle with decisions about fertilize, mulching, etc. We fight animals from mice/voles all the way to deer. We battle the weather from the first frost to last one. It’s just one thing after another.
I know this is all old news to everyone here, but I really do think @Drew51’s simple quote above is worth expanding on. Growing fruit, especially stone fruit, sometimes feels like I’m flat out working against nature, perhaps because the fruit we grow today is so different from their wild cousins from which they come. Whatever the case, I hope the people on this site who are new to fruit growing and feel overwhelmed will remember Drew’s simple statement and my expansion of it: Stone fruit is hard to grow!
I feel people’s pain. I’m in a great spot with low pest pressure, yet I still have lost some battles.What is sad is easy fruits because of invasive pests are becoming hard fruits. Sad to see. Once trees are established and healthy, and you now know how to protect them. The harvest is sweet. It makes it all worth it! This year as mentioned was amazing.
Always nice to mix it up! (raspberries, strawberries, blueberries, tomatoes, plums and Einsett grapes).
What? West coast fruit in Michigan? Yup, some work well.
Spice-Zee Nectaplum. These things are huge!
Are those fruit in the top pic all your pluots? Nice harvest. Are pluots good in preserves, or did those just get put in the freezer? I wonder how well they’d can.
How would you rate the Spice Zee flavor wise, and about how many of those did you get this year?
What a GREAT bunch of photos…and more importantly, what a great harvest. You did well, for sure. I’m especially excited to see your Spice Zee Nectaplum since I planted one of my own last spring. And boy did that thing grow! It is definitely one of my most vigorous trees- at least it was last year. Those in your photo also have what @fruitnut affectionately calls “sugar spots” which is a good name for them since I do find that they appear on extremely sweet fruits. Were those especially sweet? BTW… is your actually tree red-leafed. Mine started that way and was red most of the summer, but in late summer most of it turned green except the tips where new growth was pushing and it was red.
Maybe the rootstock. Peaches or nectarines here on citation barely grow once they start fruiting. Have removed mine, except honey kist nectarine, and one arctic jay in a pot, which probably didn’t grow 2 inches this year. The kist which lost its crop grew enough fruiting wood to have decent potential for this spring. Bottom line is peaches and nectarines do horribly on citation here, and maybe that’s citymans problem, as I have no problem with lack of vigor on lovell.
No peaches I didn’t take many photos of the pluots. Like Flavor Queen, beautiful looking fruit. And most do not like this fruit. I thought it was good, almost tropical in taste. never tasted a plum (pluot) like that before.
Dapple Dandy Pluots
Well the first two years it fruited, I thought it was super bland. i was ready to pull it, This year it didn’t flower well, the only tree. But produced about 30 fruit, and they were amazing! My wife said the best nectarine she ever had. They are low to medium acid. So it appears to be a year by year thing. I think though I’m going to thin to 40-50 in the future, the tree produces about 150. I thinned to 80 those first two years. The tree can only produce so much sugar. See what it does this spring?
The peaches did! Not a long shelf life. We ate all the pluots as they last 5-7 weeks in the fridge, amazing shelf life!
Dapple Dandy are huge for a plum, hey pluots are just glorified plums. Super good though!
Flavor King in the middle, DD around them I posted this before.
Well Fruitnut and on the west coast really become sweet. Most of those specs probably are not sugar spots.
No, compared to west coast examples. I still loved them all the same! I’m super happy with these results.
I haven’t had a chance to read all the replies on this thread (I’m at work), so forgive me if I repeat what someone else has said.
As far as peaches, you can see my profile to see what I have. Personally, I haven’t had any more issues with the white peaches than the orange fleshed ones. You just need to have a spray program for brown rot and insects - especially early in the season.
Late frosts can be an issue. I know some recommend RedHaven, but it has been my worst for getting hit hard by late frosts as it blooms before my other peach trees.
As for blackberries, Triple Crown is by far my favorite. Sweeter than the others, and even so when picked early. For most blackberries, wait until the berry loses its gloss. The berry should also give a little when you squeeze it, and not be hard. The berries are usually ripe and sweet at this stage.
@drewk I live near the Rutherford/Cannon county border, so fairly close to you. For a local peach tree source, I recommend Cumberland Valley Nursery in McMinnville. Speak with Nick. He can answer any peach tree question you could possibly have.
@thecityman I dont feel that way. I think we can all easily get distracted by other fruits. I enjoy blackberries myself, but usually just pick the wild ones around me. I am in Williamson county between Thompson’s Station and Franklin.
I haven’t seen the list, thanks! Great info, I knew TyTy wasn’t a great source from other plants as well.
I am on a gentle slope so hopefully water saturation won’t be an issue. I planted a plum tree this spring and I think the trunk may have doubled in caliper! I did amend the huge hole I dug and may have used fertilizer once.
@Matt_in_Maryland You recommend the Madison is a better bet than the Elberta? Is that for late frost hardiness or flavor - or both?
@Drew51 Nice looking selection of tomatoes there, is that another ruit you really enjoy? I’m still trying to find a variety I really enjoy. I think Cherokee Purple has been the best one so far. Many seem mealy, bland, etc. Great harvest!
@RobThomas Which of your trees do the best? I lived in Murfreesboro until I moved out here a little over a year ago.
Thanks for the info! Is this a good time of year to plant the trees?
Both, based on what I’ve read and been told, though I will admit Elberta also has a rep as cold hardy too.
Rob,
Are you certain you have Redhaven? I have about 20 Redhaven’s and they are one of the later blooming varieties (and very reliable). Mine certainly bloomed later than White River (which was a very early bloomer for me). I can’t remember exactly where Redhaven blooms compared to Contender and Carolina Gold (two other peaches on your profile) but I think my Redhavens bloom very close. I’ll try to remember to watch those varieties a little closer this spring.
