The general causes of split and shattered pits are pretty well documented. Over watering, over fertilizing, over thinning, and thinning at the wrong time seem to be identified as potential causes. But it appears that some varieties are just more susceptible than others. Of all my stone fruit varieties ‘Beauty’ plum tends to get shattered pits. Mainly the tips break off, which is frustrating because I always eat stone fruit from the blossom end first, because that is generally the ripest/best part of the fruit.
I’m interested in hearing about other folks experiences with split or shattered pits.
Here it is the early varieties of peaches that you get split and fractured pits from. Pluots seem susceptible also but I’m not experienced enough with them to have much real knowledge there.
My earliest peach, ‘Desert Gold’ starts in April, is already done and doesn’t have this behavior. ‘Beauty’ is my earliest plum or pluot and it’s going full bore right now. I’d say about half of the plums have shattered pits.
I know this is an old thread, but rather than start a new one I will add to it. I have found tons of split pits on my peach trees today. A lot of my peaches do not look healthy, on some trees I am getting really bad peach drop this year (I counted over 40 small peaches on an unknown white peach). I experienced a late cold wet spring like everyone else. We had multiple late frosts after the peaches had set. I also thinned early. Reading the articles thinning to early can cause split pit. Some of the advice I have gotten is to thin early to make sure the peaches have good flavor. So I am at a loss - when is the right time to thin? The articles online say three quarter to one inch is the right time to thin. Anyone else seen peaches split like this?
I have not had any split that way Richard. Last year I had a lot of splits early in the growing season (about golf ball size or a little smaller) on my O’Henry, but the peach would hold together and sap would ooze from a pinhole somewhere on the fruit - that was the only clue that the pit had shattered. I resolved to water less during pit hardening, but am not sure if that is the problem or not.
This is really odd. I looked at my Black Boy peach and it is doing the identical thing. The peaches are smaller though. My father is finding splits on his Contender peaches. The picture I posted was from an Elberta peach.
I’ve seen peaches like this, but very rarely. This year will be horrible here for split pits.
We have very sparse peaches on the trees which have fruit. Then we had a really long cool spring, which increases the cell count in the peaches. Then we’ve had tons of rain. About 4" of rain a couple days ago.
All that spell trouble for split pits. Most of the time it’s the earliest peaches which split worse, but last year we had some later peaches which had tons of split pits.
Spud, in years where the peaches already have a thin crop, it doesn’t hurt to delay thinning. It reduces the cell count to thin later, which is a good thing if you are trying to avoid split pits.
Thinning later won’t shouldn’t hurt flavor, as along as you thin at least a month before harvest. Thinning later will reduce size vs. thinning early.
According the the literature I’ve read on the subject, the size increase that occurs because of more cells increases brix or, at least doesn’t decrease it as does larger cells from later thinning. In other words, early thinning increases size as well as brix, while late thinning only increases size.
However, if the crop is already thin and there’s a chance of more losses to come, obviously thinning shold be pursued with caution.
I’d be interested in any references you might be able to point me to.
Regarding overall peach size, I’ve read the biggest bang for the buck is early thinning because cell count has more impact on overall size of the peach vs. the size of the cells in the peach. Since late thinning has no impact on cell count, it has a very marginal impact on the size of the peach (Actually many sources I’ve read indicate late thinning has no impact on peach size.)
Since sugars (and carbohydrates which later convert to sugars) don’t start filling the cells until after pit hardening, I can only see that late thinning might affect sugars if it decreased the vigor (i.e. leaf count) of the shoots feeding the peaches. I have seen this with weak short shoots, but we normally remove those anyway.
With normal shoots, there is a reduction in vigor of the shoot, when left with too many fruit, but the vigor bounces back almost immediately when those shoots are thinned, but I would probably classify our trees as high vigor anyway (because of rain, soil, and drainage) regardless of how they are thinned.
It’s purely anecdotal, but last season we had some trees we left too much fruit on and weren’t very sweet. I didn’t even sell them. These were primarily later varieties, where I commonly tell my thinners they can leave more peaches on later varieties because obviously later varieties size better. After I realized we left too much fruit on, we went through and had an “emergency” thinning session, where we took off quite a bit more fruit with only a few weeks left before some peaches would have been ready for harvest.
I wasn’t so much worried about the size, but the eating quality. Again purely anecdotal, but by my standards the emergency thinning worked. The eating quality ended up pretty decent on those rows.
Here’s an article which discusses some nuances of peach thinning and some of the physiological aspects of peach development.
I’m having trouble searching for anything today as I keep coming on and off line. It’s been many years since I read about increasing cell quantity improves flavor as well as size while increasing cell size only increases size. Brix doesn’t receive a lot of research attention outside of wine grapes.
What I did read seemed to consistently state that early thinning is really the only time if you are attempting to raise quality. However, I don’t disbelieve your observation. My own experience has contradicted the literature too many times. It would have been interesting if you’d left at least one tree the way it was for comparison.
So I walked my peach trees at the house today and they are all having issues with the peaches splitting open. Almost all if not all peaches under a certain size are splitting or just flat outright dying. The larger peaches have not split yet but I think they are developing sutures that indicate they will split. Looking at this closer, given the extent of the damage I am fairly certain this is related to the late frost/low temperatures. It looks like I may get lucky and get some early season peaches that will ripen before they split. Later today I will check the trees at the farm … This weather - peaches blooming in February and frost/below freezing temperatures in May. I have not seen any damage to the nectarines but I assume it is coming.
So I checked the trees at the farm (maybe a mile straight line from my house, two max). No damage at all. Its interesting how two different sets of peach trees one - two miles apart have different results. Unfortunately my mature trees are at my house - so I probably lost 80% of my peaches.
Once again this forum had an answer. We had no peaches this year, so we’ve patronized a local peach orchard. A high percentage of peaches in our last basket had split pits. My wife asked me if I knew what would cause that. I did not, but I searched here first and had an answer in less than a minute that I had confidence in.
