Thanks. Guardian is supposedly better for the SE because of nematode resistance, but I don’t know about winter hardiness. Prob good enough for your location. I think I’ve read on here that peaches don’t do so well on Citation.
I’d like to try more peach trees, but have never had a crop with the 4 trees I do have because of freezes. Plus, I’m running out of places to put more trees. I’ll have to find a spot for 10 potted apples as it is.
So, how many peach and other trees do you have now?
Will do…
Best I’ve found was where I bought my last one, though they are sold out and have been for over a year
I’ve already got 2 of the non-contorted/variegated poncirus…pretty big ones too. They’ve been in the ground for about 8 years and both started bearing in the last couple days.
Scott
Thanks for the link. A few of the ones that I planted last year were probably about 4 years old or so. The rest were smaller 1-3 years old. I’m looking forward to seeing fruit on them.
Smaller peach trees always limb out better than buying bigger ones.
We all like a big tree for our money, but the health of the tree and how it shapes up should be of equal or higher consideration…if we’re patient we will be rewarded. Not quite as true with apples, but even so on a small tree you can train it the way you want it.
Seriously? you want to BUY Vaccimeum arboreum??? I must be missing some kind of incredible money-making opportunity here. They are all over our place, they like terrible acidic clay with a pH like 4.5. They ARE beautiful in bloom, and the Deerberry look even better because the branches twist gracefully. Each have their charms, as the Sparkleberry has such strange awkward angular branching. I did try to root some deerberry with the idea that it might be salable for bonsai. Sparkleberry don’t give me the impression they would be easy to root, and I bet their roots go down deep to deal with drought.
In Tennessee,I can imagine them being plentiful,but they are not native here.From reading,they will grow in high pH soils also.
That is where their advantage is."Regular"Blueberries,which usually need a fairly acidic environment to thrive,can be grafted to them and grown in alkaline places.
Mine got to about 5 feet tall before they fruited. My biggest one is at least 8 feet tall and had dozens of fruit last year.
I found it bracingly sour but didn’t notice the infamous sap that I’ve heard the fruit are infamous for having. Fruit were small, slightly larger than quarter sized or so…
Scott
Drove 6 hours to see Cliff England and bought 23 trees (Pawpaw, Che, Mulberry, Astringent and Non Astringent Persimmon. Got a Morus Nigra from Germany that should be cold hardy. Got some scions for grafting and some others for rooting.
Hard to find the off button sometimes. My excuse is I bought the lot next door and it is my new mini orchard in waiting.
can you not just add sulfur to the soil and get blueberries to grow? Or run up the Mg way higher than the Ca? Someone did an experiment showing that was the only thing blueberries really wanted, was for the Ca level to be lower than the Mg, and never mind the pH. Neil Kinsey has a story in his book Hands On Agronomy where he talks with some farmer who’s soil he has tested and the farmer says what about field X? Could I grow blueberries there? Neil says he doesn’t know much about blueberries, but that the soil in that field is so well balanced that he figured any crop would do well. The farmer says that’s the field with the blueberries. Everyone told me I couldn’t grow em, and they are doing great.
You could start throwing on the Epsoms salts to run up both Mg and sulfur, hmmm… bet it would stop clover in it’s tracks, and that’s when you could risk trying some blueberries. I suppose these are the Northern Highbush? Rabbiteyes are so much more vigorous. The very idea of a grafted blueberry is odd to me. But those sparkleberries, we have some that are small trees. I have tried to protect them, they look like they belong in a Japanese garden, only it’s on a hot SW slope! If you scrape off the outer brownish coating, the trunks of the older ones look closer to Manzanita than anything else we have around here.
Yes,grafting Blueberries is unusual.The first time I read about it,about ten years ago,Oregon State U. was growing out Sparkleberry to a single stalk.After gaining a little diameter,they added a Northern Highbush variety and the plants grew,looking like small trees.
About that time too,a small business,maybe in China,had videos out,some showing Blueberry grafting.
The Oregon State thing was an appealing idea to me and I wanted to try it.Unfortunately,my knowledge of how to start and maintain a single Sparkleberry trunk was limited.
That’s interesting about the relationship between Ca and Mg.If available,please post the information,from that experiment.The only prominent discovery and practice,that I’ve read about,was when Frederick Coville,found they grew and thrived,because the available iron in the soil,could be utilized,at a lower pH.
Seems like a simple question but I honestly am not sure. I lost my database in my housefire so I need to rebuild it. My order of about 20 new trees sounds dramatic, but for the first time in many years I;m going to remove some trees that I am not happy with. So those trees are, if I can find the heart to cut other trees down, going to only be a net increase of maybe 3-4 trees. That will put me somewhere in the 140 tree range. Before anyone passes out, that includes like 15 figs which require almost no work (and probably should be considered a bush and not tree). Also includes some mulberries, ju jubes, and 5 pawpaws, again, none of which requires much or any input. So its not as bad as it sounds. All that being said I probably have about 90 stone fruit trees and they DO require ALL KINDS of work- as you know.
I’m really sorry you have had such bad luck with peaches and late freezes. We are almost in the same state but I know there is a world of difference in our climates. Hang in there…this is your year!
I’m hoping to buy 200-250 8’ studded T-Posts so I can fence in the orchard area and start planting out trees from the nursery bed, but I’ll be darned if I can find a source. That’s my big “order” for this year, fingers crossed.
Where did you order Au Cherry from?
Wow. That’s a lot of T-posts! Those are what we use to stake our trees and wrap them for deer ‘protection’. I am always lugging a dozen or so home, from Home Depot . . . Seems to be an ongoing occupation. If we ever start getting some decent fruit, I am sure we will have to do something ‘electric’ to truly deter the deer.
I’m not usually an early adopter of plant varieties, but Gurney’s got me with their new rhubarb introduction KangaRhu. They claim that it’s extra-extra red and has very high heat tolerance for harvests into July, both of which sound appealing. I’m not a huge fan of Gurney’s marketing strategy and silly names, but someone on here pointed out that their introductions tend to be genuinely great for the home gardener.
Gurneys was one of the companies that I ordered from, back when I didn’t know about other choices . . . or maybe they weren’t really out there for ‘backyard’ gardeners. There was no internet . . . one depended on signing up for a catalog - and doing a lot of waiting!
Michigan (yuck) Bulb was another. I got 4 or 5 ridiculously small pomegranate starts from both of them . . . that never survived! I’d been trying to get a pomegranate to live, here in VA, for years and years. And when one finally ‘took’ - it didn’t bear fruit for a good decade or so. It was a total surprise when it did!
I agree with you about the marketing strategies. Everything sounds like it will just thrive in all zones! ‘Big Luscious’ fruit! Etc Etc.
But that rhubarb sounds interesting! And maybe now they’ve ‘upped their game’ - and do have introductions, as someone said, that are OK for home gardeners. I just got burned too many times!
What do you do with your rhubarb? The only thing I would know what to use it for is ‘Strawberry Rhubarb Pie’.
I am afraid to grow it because of all the TOXIC warnings. My mother used to raise canaries in the early 1950s. She had rhubarb growing in the backyard. When my parents left for a few days, they left my older sister in charge of ‘canary detail’. She and her friends fed them rhubarb leaves, thinking they’d like something green to eat . . . and wiped out the whole lot of them. 
Uh oh. My mom was NOT pleased when she got home.
I mostly do pies, tarts, etc. But I’d love to do more jams and maybe try a a wine. Back when I was the baker for a restaurant, I once made a batch of peach-rhubarb pie, as the last bit of local rhubarb outlasted the last of the local strawberries, and overlapped with our first peaches. It was absolutely amazing, and having rhubarb available over the summer will make many more novel combinations possible.
Yeah, the leaves are definitely poisonous! that is a sad story about the canaries!
I do remember flipping through Gurney’s catalogs every year as a little kid, so I’ve got to give them credit for stoking my already budding gardening interest. I’ll see how their rhubarb turns out.
Which is refreshing in an age where pretty much everything coming out of the University system is entirely aimed at commercial clients. I sometimes get a little frustrated by my alma mater, whose mission originally included “improving the lives of rural residents.” The Regents have forgotten there are any.