Well, I’m at the orchard typing on my phone, as is frequently my routine, so I don’t have my records handy. But, I have a pretty good idea from memory, but may leave some varieties out. Also, I temper my recs with flavor. In other words a variety like Garnet Beauty may be as reliable as Redhaven for its window , but doesn’t taste as good as Risingstar, which is slightly less reliable, but better flavored enough, I’d rather plant it for that window.
In order of ripen, my recs for productivity are:
Earlystar
Risingstar
PF9a-007
Redhaven
Challenger
All-star or Intrepid
Veteran or Contender or Scarlet Prince
July Prince
Baby Crawford or Madison
Carolina Gold
PF 35-007
Laurol
Victoria
Like I said, there are many others I like for these windows, but for overall productivity and flavor, I like these.
On the other end, the least productive for me are some of the Loring sibs. Loring was developed here on MO. But it is unproductive along with it’s relatives, even though they put on great size and taste great.
Unproductive varieties include Loring, Topaz, Johnboy, PF24-007, Messina, PF28-007.
Glenglo is a Loring offspring and not real productive, but is such a nice early peach I forgive it some. It really is a beautiful peach, and tastes great. Our Glenglos put on full crops this year.
Encore is super productive, but doesn’t taste that great.
Mark,
I faithfully read your peach posts. As a backyard grower of peaches, productivity is not my concern. I focus more on taste, winter hardiness and, if ever possible, disease resistant.
I am getting a real appreciation for the difference in varieties that over set vs varieties that under set. Extreem opposites for me are O’Henry and PF24C. Considering that O’Henry blooms are about four times bigger than PF24C blooms, there is a stark contrast in the number of blooms each variety produces for me.
O’Henry below:
Subdood, if you are certain they are true to label and have at least a couple years of age, that is strange indeed. I’ve been growing Redhaven for a long time (currently have about 20 trees of it) and never had a failed crop. I’ve grown Contender less long, but sets like Redhaven or better.
As a new member, just getting my first ever real crop of peaches on 2 small backyard trees, I wanted to thank you for all your posts here and on other threads about how you think about peach thinning. If you ever consider doing another video on it, maybe while you are thinning live this year pl know you have a more than ready audience!
I’m going to brace myself and go thin my peaches this weekend.
I don’t know why I deleted the original video. Maybe I didn’t think it was very good.
I’ll try to do another one at some point. It won’t be this year though. Everyone in the area, including me got froze out this winter. We had basically zero bloom on peaches.
I’m into thinning my first peach tree. I removed approx 2/3 of the fruit via pruning. Both thinning out the wood and cutting other shoots back. Now it’s on too leaving the biggest fruit that’s left. But that will still leave 2-3x too much fruit. So, I’ll be thinning more over the next month.
@Olpea Hey sorry to hear no flowers.
So none? Had this happened before?
Just wondering how often this happens there.
It happened to me once in ten years.
We are fine this year.
Now I want to cry.
I was concerned when I was at my orchard two weeks ago and I saw the flower buds swelling and I looked at the forecast and there were still plenty of nights at or slightly below freezing in the forecast.
That’s not just a Northeast PA thing. The orchard I used to work at in Southeast PA had entire varieties in full bloom when temperatures went south.
On the very top of the orchard I saw about a dozen blooms on some trees. I saw maybe a couple blooms on a row of Earlystar peaches, but other than that, none.
Of course I won’t even bother spraying them.
The last time this happened was in 2019 or 2020 when it got to about -19F at the orchard. Before that, I had never experienced that since I started growing peaches in my backyard in 2002.
This winter it got down to about -12F at the orchard, which should have done damage, but left some live dormant fruit buds. But the problem was that it got down to -12F two nights in a row, and the high for the day was something like -2F. So it stayed really cold for a really long time. I don’t think it would have done near the damage had the temp just touched -12F then moved right back up. But it stayed at -12F for hours two nights in a row.
Normally spring frosts are the nemesis for peaches in this area, but this year there were no peach flowers for the spring frosts to kill.
I am still waiting to see how research on the cellulose nanocrystals works out. Washington State university had very promising trials on it. However, Bill Shane has been testing it up at MSU and hasn’t gotten as much benefit from it, in initial testing, as reported from WSU.
I haven’t heard anything recently about it. It was supposed to be commercially available in 2023, but I haven’t seen anything lately about it. If it works, it could be an important tool to protect against both winter damage and spring frosts.
Yes will try my best not to. Though my 2 trees are small and had very little new growth last year because of constant brown rot issues. I’m actually surprised the August Pride has put on so many tiny fruits. The new growth this year is already like 3x of what I had last year. A lot of my fruits are on tiny branches or right on the main trunk-ish. I’ll post some pics of before and after and keep a count of how much I thin. I probably have about 30-50 tiny fruitlets at max on the peaches (combined across 2 trees) right now. They were basically just the main leaders going into dormancy and then I trimmed out the remaining brown rot and then did some structural pruning to avoid crossing, reduced the lengths of some shoots, etc. I’m hoping this year they grow well and I need to actually prune them over the summer.
I found this post really useful for figuring out how to thin this year. It is also my first year thinning!
Oh no, I am really sorry. You have been so helpful to me in learning to grow fruit. My area seems to be doing well this year and I was hoping your area would do well too.
For commercial growers thinning peaches early is very important because size sells, even though healthy peach trees don’t tend to bear biennially as a result of over-cropping. Apples do, so often need early thinning to assure annual cropping.
Non-professionals tend to underthiin and their mistake may only become clear to them when the peaches are approaching full size, when they will be ready to harvest in 2-4 weeks. One may think thinning is no longer worth it, but those weeks preceding harvest are key to getting the fruit up to highest brix. Even if you haven’t thinned at all up to that point it is very advantageous to fruit quality and reduction of branch breakage to thin fruit late. Making sure fruit isn’t touching also reduces brown rot pressure substantially and insect damage somewhat.
Here’s some more commercial peach thinning thoughts.
I wrote up a page so that new employees would understand why we thin (because hours and hours are spent in this endeavor).
I titled it, “The Ten Commandments of Peach Thinning”. That was my way of emphasizing the most important things of peach thinning, but it could have been titled anything to emphasize the most important thinning concepts. My ideas are absolutely not absolute, just what I think is most important as a commercial grower. Here they are, including, “Why Thin Peaches?”:
The Ten Commandments of Peach Thinning (In order of priority)
Remove all fruit in the crotch angles of the shoots, unless the only fruitlet on that shoot is in the crotch.*
Remove all doubles (Siamese twins) and triplets.*
Leave one fruit per 10” of branch space (i.e. a shoot that is 10” long, leave one fruit. For a shoot 20” long, leave two fruit.) Fruit at the top of the canopy can be thinned less. For fruit at the very top of the canopy, it should be thinned at 1 fruit per 8” of branch space. Thin 1 fruit for 4” of branch space if still in the shuck, or the fruit is less than thumbnail size, as many of these smaller fruit will abort. For early maturing varieties leave one fruit per 12” of branch space.*
Round up to the nearest increment of 12” when determining how may fruit to leave on a shoot. In other words, if a shoot is longer than 12”, but shorter than 24”, round up to 24” when determining how many fruit to leave on the shoot. For example, for a 15” shoot, round up to 24” in assessing how many fruit to leave on the shoot (In this case leave two fruit on the shoot. 24” shoot = 2 fruit on the shoot.) If the shoot is 18” long, round up to 24”, which would mean again leaving 2 fruit on the shoot. If the shoot is 26” long, round up and assume the shoot is 36” long, so as to leave 3 fruit on the shoot. For fruit at the very top of the canopy, round up shoot length in increments of 10” for determining how many fruit to leave on the shoot, keeping in mind to leave one fruit every 10” at the very top of the canopy.*
Remove all fruit on shoots less than 6” on the lower portion of the tree’s canopy. (The word “shoot” refers to one-year old growth, not brand new green growth. Brand new green growth won’t have any peaches on it.) In the upper portion of the trees canopy, leave one fruit on a 6” shoot. The tree’s upper canopy receives more sunlight, so 6” shoots can be productive in the upper canopy. *
When thinning, try to select the bigger fruits as keepers, except when the fruit will be too close to each other (Fruit less than 6” apart is generally too close, unless one fruit is on the top and one on the bottom) It’s very important to leave the bigger fruits when thinning because the tree will naturally abort many of the smaller fruit later on.*
No shoot, no matter how long, should ever carry more than 4 fruit. Most shoots will carry from 1 to 3 fruit.*
Fruitlets hide in the foliage. As you’re thinning a shoot, move your fingers down the shoot to make sure no fruitlets are hiding on the backside. *
Once you’ve thinned a portion of the tree, if you enter the interior of the tree to do more thinning, take care not to knock extra fruit off of branches you’ve already thinned. (That’s why it’s best to thin the middle of the tree first, so you don’t have to enter the middle after you’ve thinned the outside, which will potentially knock fruits off branches you’ve already thinned.*
After the tree is thinned, walk around the tree slowly two times carefully examining branches to make sure all the shoots were thinned.*
WHY THIN PEACHES?
Thinning is a process of purposely removing fruit from branches/shoots. It is very important that it not only be done, but done early in the season.
Why thin? Peach trees generally set 70-90% more fruit than they can grow to harvest. Peach trees harvest sunlight to produce fruit. By way of photosynthesis, peach trees use sunlight to convert water and CO2 into carbohydrates and sugars for the fruit. It takes approximately 35 leaves (close to a fruit) to harvest enough sunlight to produce a good fruit. If there are too many fruit, the leaves can’t capture enough sunlight to “feed” the fruit with enough carbohydrates and sugars. The result is smaller fruit that is less sweet. Un-thinned peach trees many times produce fruit hardly bigger than a golf ball.
Another reason we thin is that because there are so very many fruit on an un-thinned peach tree, the weight of all the peaches tends to break branches later on.
Lastly, an un-thinned peach load puts more stress on the tree. The tree is putting all the energy it can into feeding an enormous amount of peaches, even to the tree’s own detriment.
For these reasons we remove 70-90% of the peaches early in the season.
That is all excellent advice, but home growers often won’t follow it and will generally leave a lot more peaches than that the first time they go through, including me. I prefer to do the job halfway the first time through.
I wish there was a way to tell clearly how much energy a peach consumes relative to it point of ripeness, but my assumption is that as they get larger they pull proportionately more energy and that the tree is not excessively taxed by holding fruit a a few week longer before doing the final thin. or at least the final thin before the actual finale when harvest is under 4 weeks away.
Non commercial growers tend to do fewer sprays so we often hedge our bets a bit. Peaches from trees I manage tend to be larger than commercially available even without pushing it to the max.
Non-professionals who often underthin should be encouraged to thin later if they don’t thin sooner. Most of the benefits of thinning as far as brix are concerned seem to come in the last month of ripening.
pl know you have a more than ready audience!
sorry to hear that.