Thinning vs poor fruit set

Thanks Olpea as always for the great advice, boy, looks like you butchered those trees but after growing peaches for 4 years I am starting to understand why. The last 2 years I have had to do a spring prune and 2 summer prunes to keep my trees under 7 feet.

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Same experience here Chris. Mine are 4th leaf too. It seems every year I become more brutal in my pruning.

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Ok, sorry Mike, I missed the part about pruning in summer.

What you say makes sense, as long as that unproductive wood is pruned off early before it shades productive peach wood dependent on sunlight for sweet peaches.

From my perspective, it would be too hard to manage. Heck, when we get into the harvest season, we can barely manage weed control, much less the trees.

I recall your espailer pics, which were perfect, so I’ve little doubt you could manage it.

I’m not the only one around here with such difficulty managing things. A friend got so behind last year he turned 4 guys loose with weed eaters for weeds. Hard to keep up in the growing season.

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You guys need to be careful with summer pruning and not over do
it, because it encourages peach tree short life disease.

Ray,

I normally wouldn’t prune so heavily, only because of lack of wood w/ fruitlets. These trees I’m pruning now are some of the hardest hit by the freezes, and ones I’ve most severely pruned.

However, unlike the Southeast, we don’t get PTSL here. Our heavy clay soil doesn’t have the nematodes which contribute to PTSL (although the heavy clay can drown trees if they aren’t planted in some type of raised planting).

There is a risk severely butchered trees can be sunburned before enough foliage can shade the scaffolds.

cckw,

Flowers will hold on a tree even after frost damage, for two weeks or more, depending on weather. The only way to tell soon after the frost is to cut the flowers open. If the ovary is plump, cut the ovary open. If it’s not brown inside, it’s alive. If the ovary is brown inside, or if it looks at all shriveled on the outside, or not very plump, it’s probably dead.

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I think this is the common theory and I have a different one. It isn’t so much about sun exposure to wood, although that plays into it- it is about inadequate early foliage to pull adequate sap which creates cooling for the cambium. Shade helps, of course, but bark can be completely exposed to sun and be fine if enough sap is passing through the cambium.

Having managed a lot of huge apple trees where arborists were afraid to leave stretches of big wood exposed and therefore cut annual shoots to stubs, I’ve had the opportunity 100’s of times to see what happens when those stubs are completely removed, exposing the wood to full sun for the first time (not just from removing stubs but from opening up trees with aggressive branch thinning).

Once I learned how to evaluate the balance of leaving enough budded small wood in ratio to the big wood on any given scaffold I’ve never had issues with scorch.

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Three of the six nectarines on that entire “bush”. They are supported by vigorous growth along that side so I’m relieved to think I can keep all three.

The squirrels will be thrilled! I have a local opossum that loves pluots.

Those look like peaches but not close enough to be sure. I’d certainly keep all three and a few more in that area if that was about all on the tree.

That’s actually my second question. They look EXACTLY like my other peach trees; they are the first fruit from this tree; they are “sunred nectarines” from Willis Orchards. So now I suppose I’m wondering what kind of peach they actually are.

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All peaches are good in my opinion but some are better than others. I have a sunred but it hasn’t fruited yet so I can’t offer you any comparison.

Well if from Willis it could be anything. They should change their name to Ty Ty Jr nursery.

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Peach are easy to tell from nectarine right out of the gate. If fuzzy it’s a peach. If smooth a nectarine. The fruit pictured above has that fuzzy look.

I suspected that much but had a small hope that nectarines at some point just stopped growing fuzz as they sized up. These are DEFINITELY fuzzy. I’m annoyed at having a completely unidentified tree in my yard, and I bought a BUNCH of trees from them a couple years ago. Lots of them died, but I wasn’t sure it wasn’t something I did so I never tried claiming any refunds or replacements. Now I don’t trust almost any of my stone fruit to be what they are supposed to be, which is very frustrating.

It’s still fruit in your own backyard, you can’t beat that! Plus now graft over anything no good. You won’t have to wait as long for fruit that way. Between all of us here, we have everything!! Whatever you want to try this group can supply scion.

I’m going to have to have a short fuse on them otherwise they’ll stay forever. If I’m not super impressed by the imposter peaches, I’ll graft it immediately, because otherwise I’ll never convince myself that they weren’t poor quality simply because of something I’m doing or not doing, so I’ll try again the next year, then if they are even slightly better, it’ll make me hesitate and blah blah blah. It’s got to be tastier than the contender peaches I liked last year or it’s in the showiest spot on that side of the yard and will make a perfect multigraft specimen tree.

I’m really eager to have some of those double flower peaches growing, so I’ll try to come up with some of those at least.

But you won’t ordering them from Willis, eh?

I didn’t want to leave that butchered photo of a tree I posted earlier in this topic as my only pic of pruning this year. We are now getting into trees which have more fruit, and so not removing so much unproductive wood. Here is a pic of one of the trees we pruned today.

We still pruned a lot out of the tree (you can see the shoots on the ground) but I think it has about the amount of wood left.

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Those are some great looking trees! Very wide and flat compared to the trees around here. How high is the terrace they are planted on?

Thanks Blueberry,

I’d say on average, the terraces are about 3’ high. I pushed them up to give plenty of well drained dirt for the peach trees (unlike the Southeast, the drainage is terrible here, so the trees need all the help they can get).