What does peach petal fall look like?!

General Fruit Growing
#1

Ladies and gentlemen, I present possibly the dumbest question ever asked in here!

What does petal fall look like in peaches?!? The reason I ask is my peaches were in full bloom with obvious flowers and petals and looking very pretty for a week or so. But for the last week or so they’ve looked kind of weathered and beat up and like nothing you’d want to put into a vase.

They have things that look a bit like “petals“, but they look nothing like the big petals of a tree in full bloom.

The attached photo is what most of my peach flowers look like. Has pedal fall happened yet? Or do I have to wait a while longer?

Thanks!

PS - I feel like the more years I have under my belt growing fruit trees, the dumber I am getting!

image

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#2

Those things are called shucks and as the fruit grows,they split and fall off.bb

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#3

Don’t worry. I always heard that you should spray at ‘shuck split’, but no one ever explained what shuck split was. So I had to Google it to find out :slight_smile:

#4

Thanks Brady

So petal fall has occurred?

#5

Thats what it looks like! Petal fall means the petals fell off .

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#6

Don’t feel bad Bart. I have 3 Red Havens and their blooms are small to begin with. I missed spraying at petal fall once due to travel. When I got back, they looked like yours! I saw little peaches before I figured it out. But so did the OFM…

#7

Thanks all! The shucks threw me off. I thought they were dying and drying petals, shriveling up and getting ready to fall off. It seemed odd that they never fell off!! :joy:

And I hear you about the small blooms on Red Haven! I went from thinking “are they even blooming yet?” to “are they ever going to finish blooming?” Because the flowers were barely bigger than the shucks!!

#8

Botanically what you are seeing is the flower minus the petals. The cup-like structure at the base is the hypanthium, with its five sepals (calyx) attached around its rim. The many stamens are also attached to the rim of the hypanthium. This is a perigynous flower, since there is a hypanthium but the hypanthium is not fused to the ovary wall (like an apple or pear would be - that’s an epigynous flower). The ovary is in there too, sitting inside and at the base of the hypanthium. Once the hypanthium abscises from the receptacle of the flower, the hypanthium/calyx/stamens will fall as a unit, leaving the ovary (young fruit) attached to the shoot.

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