Yields for me have been all over the place.
I have harvested 15 5 gallon buckets of peaches from my June Gold. Limb supports were used. Other peach varieties my only produce 2-3.
My Ark Black is on the stingy side. 15 year old on M 111 produces only a couple bushels a year.
My Winesap that is the same age varies a lot from year to year. The most I’ve ever picked was about 10 5 gallon buckets. Some years it only produces as few.
The M7 Golden D tops out at just over a bushel a year.
Hello.
In short, the trees tell you…you don’t tell the trees. Some of my trees produce bumper crops. Other trees produce very little. I have a Zestar apple tree planted in '11. Never got one apple from it to eat. It produces a few, but they never are around to ripen.
See my recent post on figs.
I’d say plant as many trees as you can, then thin out the bad ones and replace with other trees. An orchard is always losing trees. You are never done. But you may be lucky and none of this will apply to you. I’ve only given you my experience with fruit trees.
Good luck!
Welcome to the forum! I’m going to give you some numbers for Kansas which is a challenging environment to grow fruit. Yield is more complicated than you would think. If i use manure and woodchips on my pears my average yield is a bushel per tree depending on variety and quality of fruit i wish to obtain. Some types like kieffer, duchess d’ angoulme, douglas etc. will easily yield as much as apples. Sunshine and water matter. Some pears like seckel might yield 2 or more 5 gallon buckets. I have pears that you will get only 1 gallon from the entire tree. A full grown apple about 7 -10 years old will yield 4 -8 bushels in my area. Peaches are very heavy producers. My reliance yield about 1 bushel per tree.
This is how i have grown things historically
This is normal reliance peach yield from 1 tree which is 1-2 bushels every other year for me.
Should be fine to pick off fruitlets for 2 years.
I would visit growers in your area and really, really look at which trees look good at what time of year on what rootstock in what soil. I should have done this to start. I, however, picked fruit at big commercial orchards when I first moved here, so naively I thought I could grow the same fruits. Truth is I don’t want to, and don’t have time to anyway, follow the same heavy spray schedule they do. I can’t grow peaches, cherries, or Japanese plums here without a lot of losses unless I spray frequently and heavily. So all those trees I planted were basically a hard lesson learned.
I wouldn’t 100% rely on nursery catalogs, either, since what they sell may sound absolutely fantastic but not work for you.
I had to replant a lot of trees. Pretty confident with what I am growing now, but still taking the time to visit other orchards.
Find someone here who lives close by and pick their brains! Pretty friendly group.
A massive 28-year field trial of hundreds of fruit trees at the USDA Horticultural site in Cheyenne, Wyoming showed:
Apples yields: 20-70 lbs/year typical tree average, 160 lbs/year tree maximum average
Plum yields: 5-15 lbs/year typical tree average, 40 lbs/year tree maximum average
Many varieties never produced fruit, but this is likely due to the difficult growing condtions of the site (Zone 5b, semi-arid climate).
Fruit Tree Data_USDA WY.pdf (3.6 MB)
A really good yield for harrow sweet is a few 5 gallon buckets
Ten has really made me proud this year @Richard there is not a hint of bitterness and they have a good balance of sweet and tart. If you like something like granny smith apples but much sweeter these are your pear.
Leona is similar to Ten, charles harris, leona and other southern pears. You wont ever see fireblight on Leona or Ten. These large pears like these 3 fill buckets fast!
My neighbor with 5 semidwarf apple trees planted by a previous owner is clearly overwhelmed by abundance. 12 trees of 2 types is way too many in a backyard orchard. You want flavor variety in the year 2025 backyard orchard, you graft over branches to make each tree carry 3-5 cultivars.
Someone at the Savanna Institute told me since I want to have many other hobbies and my orchard wasn’t supposed to be a large time commitment, I should have stopped at 6 plots. I didn’t, and I may regret it, but I’m only in year 2.
If it helps planning, look at what I wrote for Zone 4:
My goal is to have some fresh fruit coming over the whole summer and as long as I can into fall to make the shortening days more enjoyable because zone 4 winter is just miserably long.
I would actually stick to semi-dwarves if you do not want to be overwhelmed though. Reading a Canadian trial with McIntosh and by year 5 the P.18 was outproducing semi-dwarf trees 4 and 5 to 1. 1000 pounds is not a stretch for the big 10 year plus trees…lol
With both apples and peaches, there should be an anchor tree at the front end. These are larger heavy bearing trees that allow the freezer to get stocked early on. For apples, the Pristine would be a good candidate. For me, the best early peach is the June Gold.
During the middle season, I have Bud 9 dwarf trees for fresh eating and cooking. If you have deer pressure, you may want a large tree with 10 varieties on it.
Towards the end of the growing season, it is good to have a couple late apples that are larger for bulk bearing to keep fresh over the Winter. The latest peach I have was one I did not order. I believe it’s an O’henry and it ripens the last week of August in 7B NC.
Yes, you are exactly right. The peaches can be worrisome about being overwhelmed with too many peaches at one time. I thought that as well. My RedHaven ripens first and my Contender is suppose to ripen 10-14 days after the RedHaven. The my Flaming Fury peach ripens 40 days after the RedHaven. However, it seems the ripening period of the Contender blends right into the RedHaven ripening period. LOTS of toting around 5 gallon buckets to and from. I gave so many away and still had a lot to make peach preserves out of. The Flaming Fury was later but still there was not a whole lot of down time when they were ripening. A good thing that the tree is younger and the yield was lighter. LOTS of great peaches to enjoy.
You will be busy canning and giving them away but those that you give them to will greatly appreciate it.
I have a 20+ year old Liberty with other varieties grafted to it. It’s on some semi-dwarf roots - the nursery couldn’t tell me which one. I keep it to about 12 feet high and it’s probably 20 feet across.
This year was good. So far I’ve harvested about 160 pounds and there’s easily another 50-60 pounds on the tree. I’ve given away about 50 pounds so far to neighbors and will probably give away another fifty to the food bank.
Last year there were about 10 apples on the tree and I didn’t even bother with them!
Just remember, there can be too much of a good thing …
Amazing production!
My Reliance produced very little. Cut it down after 12 years. Even when it did, peaches were sub-par.
The one good thing about lots of deer is they clean up any dropped fruit…rotting or not. And maybe they fertilize things. But I’ve read the deer poop is not that good for trees. Dunno.
Here is the deal…
Trees come and go. If they don’t work out, cut them down and put in something else.
Over the last 17 years I’ve had +/- 80 varieties of fruit trees and fruit bushes. I used to have a nice plum orchard among them. All got black knot and that was it!
Put in big trees and find out faster how things will go. Plant a twig and it may take 10 - 12 years to figure things out. My long-gone Green Gage didn’t produce a crop for 10-11 years.
Many people say that but i have great luck here.
Exactly. Absolutes are…terrible. Sometimes even M111 / P.18 fruits in 2 years. Sometimes not in 10 years. There is a lot of in between.
My experience, zero fruit from peaches. Half what your estimate is for apples
I’ve been enjoying this thread. I think @hopefulorchard needs to find someone who lives near them and grows fruit to see what/how much they’re producing.
Hilarious to me because I was just walking through the orchard thinking how everyone says peaches are hard (because of the spraying) and for me they are the easiest. All I have to do is spray! I get peaches!
It’s all local!
I’ve had decent luck with dormant wood - this is the first year I’ve tried budding peaches (in Aug/Sept) I’ll tell you in spring how well it went!
Those folks who think peaches are easy - do you live in the southern US?
