Winblo Peaches

Anybody growing Winblo peaches? I just picked my 3 year old trees for the first time. They are the best peaches I have seen by a wide margin with the best yield, Picked almost 4 bushels from 15 trees for first picking with at least that many peaches left to pick. Large peach, great yield, very sweet and not as much catfacing damage as other peaches. Winblo was in full bloom when we had a 23 degree night, but it was not impacted as much as my earlier peaches in the same field. Contender is next. Looks like its about 10 days behind Winblo. Below are my ratings so far:

Rich May- excellent
Carored- Ok, but not great
Ruby Prince- A lot better than Carored
Red Haven- Almost as good as Ruby Prince, but freestone when ripe
Flame Prince- Had a lot if insect damage, but good flavor
Winblo- Far better than anything so far, but ripening overlapped with Flame Prince

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I have a tree in southern NY whose fruit I tasted for the first time last year, but it was too small a crop to make any reliable judgement. To me it was just a real nice peach. This year will be more a test- plenty of fruit this time.

I’m eating some nice Desiree and Early Star peaches right now. Both are real good for early peaches.

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I’m a big fan. Its a classic big yellow peach with great productivity and high disease resistance. @alan, it took a few years for me to come into optimal flavor and size; your mileage may vary. There are a few peaches I would say are a bit more tasty but they are all later ripening. Clayton is similar quality and season, it varies depending on the year. Clayton is small so is not a good commercial peach.

Unfortunately my main tree got borers and finally died this spring. I grafted it to a seedling last year and it will be a few more years before I am back in gear with Winblo.

In my limited experience , if I have an early peach it has a better chance of producing fruit than a latter verity. Am I missreading this? My red haven always sucombs to brown rot after my early peach has already ripened.

Derby, I’m reluctant to answer that question here- it is a complicated question worthy of it’s own title. Why not post it as a separate topic?

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Derby, Our early peaches always do better down here in the Deep South.
Seems like the later ones always run into trouble, a big thunderstorm,fungal problems or a late cycle of oriental fruit moth.
There is a lot of skill in fruit growing but also a bit of Luck.

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Blueberry,

Can I ask where you got your Winblo? I got a few Winblo trees from Adams a few years ago and have been making copies. This is the first year a few of them have some fruit. The fruit is pretty spotty and the trees lost a lot of foliage from bac. spot. I always wonder if I have the correct variety, there are so many mislabled trees sent by nurseries.

So far our best varieties this year (with a ton of rain) are Glenglo and the flat peach Galaxy (at least I think it’s Galaxy. It was supposed to be Saturn, but the peach clearly ripens before Redhaven, not after, like Saturn is supposed to. Plus the peach looks pretty big for a Saturn.)

Olpea-

Galaxy are very big…Saturn is small… Interesting they’ve done well for you with all the rain… i’m getting a ton of spot this year on my peaches/apricots…which i usually don’t see. Inch of rain overnight again… prbably doesn’t help.

Hmmm, sounds like their incompetence may have served you well. Maybe they aren’t such a PIA to thin as Saturn. Saucer peaches really cling to the stem so a thinner set might be a blessing.

Are you sure that you’re growing Flame Prince? FP is a late ripening variety,
a full 12 days after Elberta, and is next to last to ripen in the Prince series.
That puts it in the september time frame. The peaches on my FP are still
developing and are nowhere near being ripe, and I’m further south than you are.

Rayrose

Your are right! I confused the princes. I should have said FIREPRINCE, not FLAMEPRINCE. The variety between Redhaven and Winblo is Fireprince. I have FlamePrince also so keeping the names straight is going to be a problem! My Flameprince peaches are still very small and probably 4 weeks out.

Olpea

I bought all my peach trees from Vaughn. I would like to have some flat peaches, but I was afraid I would have trouble growing them, Are they hard to grow?

Scott

I live about 100 miles north of the research farm where Winblo, Contenter, and many other NC peaches were developed. Peaches used to be big business in this area back in the “good old days.” Some of these peaches were developed with high chill hours in mind, after major freeze losses multiple years in a row bankrupted a lot of NC peach growers. Often these peaches were named for the towns where peaches were once grown on a big scale. Peaches like Candor, Troy, Winblo, Norman, Biscoe , Derby and Clayton are some of the older variety from this breeding program.

BBHill,
I know what you mean. Besides Flameprince, I also have Fireprince, July
Prince, Augustprince, and Winblo, but I keep mine all taggged, not only
on the trees, but also in my mind.

Contender is a great canner. Very productive here in 5b/6a northeast. Rain or lack thereof is always a big factor affecting peach flavor or lack thereof on my property. Plain old elberta can be spectacular here in dry years but have a disagreeable/plain taste when it ripens in a rainy season.

Rayrose

You have a lot of Georgia princes to keep up with! I only have 7 different variety total where each variety is a row of 15 trees. The names “fire” and “flame” are too close for comfort and still confuse me. I hope all my variety are OK, because I will not be pulling any variety out and replacing them. I hope to plant a few more trees to cover what looks like a gap in my peach production around July 4. The July 4 weekend is very big for PYO blackberry and blueberry on the farm and I really need some peaches during that time period. I chose my 7 variety with the help of Vaughn Nursery and a NCSU publication which listed peach preferences by a large grower about 100 miles south. I have three variety from Georgia, two from NC, one from SC and one from California.

I also have Harvester, which ripens for me around the first of July, so you might want to give it a try. It’s a good peach and very productive and should fill your gap.
It should do well in a PYO because the tree doesn’t ripen all at one time. I pick
mine over a 2-3 week period.

IMO, I think most flat peaches are harder to grow than regular peaches.

As Alan mentions, they all cling really hard to the shoot and have more than their fair share of pick damage as a result.

Without looking it up, I think I’ve been harvesting some of the NJ flat peaches for at least 3 years.

TangOs is a great peach but is badly affected by rain. The fruit gets very ugly/spotty with very much rain.

BuenOs isn’t affected by rain, but is a very sub-acid yellow peach with really very little flavor. A lot of sugar, but not much peach flavor. I have one BuenOs tree in my backyard and three of those trees at the farm. Strangely, all three of those trees at the farm died this year. These were the only peach trees which died at the farm this year, except for a white peach. They collapsed from canker. It’s weird that these were about the only trees that died, but really no big loss, since I don’t like the flavor.

BuenOs II is the more traditional yellow flat peach (with some acid). This is the first year I’ve harvested anything off these trees, but the fruit is VERY spotty from the rain. It’s the result of bac. spot, not scab. Better flavor than BuenOs, but still nothing special about the flavor of this peach.

TangOs II is the flat green white peach. This is the first year I’ve harvested it. Strangely, it’s supposed to be the hardest one to grow of the flat peaches. It is spotty, to be sure, this rainy year, but not near as spotty as BuenOs II. About as spotty as TangOs. I’ve not tasted this peach yet since its not ripe yet.

The clear winner of flat peaches so far this year is what is labeled as Saturn, but what I’m pretty sure is Galaxy. Foliage is fairly clean in this very rainy year and the fruit is blemish free. Very sweet fruit, but with the traditional lack of peach flavor common for white peaches imo. Still lots of customers loved this fruit. I just don’t like very many white peaches, but many people do. For selling fruit, this is a cultivar which is one of the easiest to sell. It’s easy to give a samples of this peach and people want the peach after tasting it. I hope to make some copies of this tree this fall.

Flat Wonderful is a NJ release recommended for home orchards which is licensed for the Gurney’s/Henry Fields conglomerate. I’ve grown this one for quite a few years. It hasn’t been very productive in the past, but this year it was loaded. It doesn’t taste as good as TangOs, but is more unique in flavor than BuenOs and BuenOs II. They are a smaller peach and so make nice samples to hand out.

Sweet Cap hasn’t ripened yet but is spotty, as is Sweet bagel. I’ve no idea how these taste, but they don’t look very pretty this year.

Olpea

Thank you for the explanation on growing flat peaches.
How about selling flat peaches? Do they sell well? Do they sell for the same price as regular peaches?
I’m guessing the yield per tree is less than regular peaches. Is that true?

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Blueberry, I think it’s fair to say flat peach trees yield less, although Flat Wonderful really produced a lot of peaches this year.

I’ve discussed this before, but most of the time flat peaches here will continue to shed fruit much later than many traditional globose peaches. In the past I’ve thinned these like normal and fairly early, which ends up producing a crop too thin. This year on flat wonderful, I thinned it pretty late and it had a good full crop, enough that for the first time it pulled branches down. Alan has mentioned he doesn’t have this problem w/ flat peaches in the NE.

Here people don’t want to buy flat peaches by just looking at them. Many people don’t even realize they are peaches. However, they will generally buy them if you can give them a sample. That’s the nice thing about the flat peaches, some markets won’t let you cut fruit into samples without a permit and a wash station, but you can give out uncut fruit. The flat peaches are small, so you aren’t giving away a huge amount of fruit for a sample. Plus some people are reluctant to bite into a big peach at a market but the smaller donut peaches are less messy to bite into than a big peach. As people are walking by my table, if sales are slow, I just ask them if they want a sample. Most people will say yes and I hand them a donut. You have to explain it’s a peach and they sometimes look at you a bit puzzled and ask if it’s OK just to eat it. I tell them my son and I eat them like that all the time in the field. I then give them a paper towel so they can clean the juice off their hands.

I gave out a lot of Flat Wonderful samples last couple of markets. Pretty much everyone expressed they like the flavor to one degree or another, but some still ended up buying the traditional globose yellow peaches after tasting Flat Wonderful.

I charge by the box at markets, but I put less weight of flat peaches in a box vs. the globose peaches. I charge the same price for either box, so that makes the flat peaches somewhat more expensive.