Winblo Peaches

General Fruit Growing
21

Olpea

These flat peaches sound good! I’m going to the state farmer’s market tomorrow and get some and see if I can determine the variety. I expect the kids and their families who are picking berries would really like them.

Just finished second picking of about half of the Winblo row. For some reason, their yield is awsome - way over a bushel a tree on a 3 year tree. Getting the peaches picked is getting to be a problem. I tried picking into a gallon bucket with a strap holding the bucket and also picking into a cardboard berry flat which is designed to hold 12 pints of berries. Both work ok, but after picking, it takes a lot of time to get the peaches loaded into the pick up and moved to the farm stand. I’m going to buy some Marco Totes 9V picking lugs on Friday and see if they work better. They are inexpensive and I hope they will double my production and improve my fun. Do you have an effective process for getting your peaches picked?

22

Whereas here I thin with same timing as other peaches, which is about 2 weeks after apple petal fall. The ones I leave stick to the tree and I thin at least one more time.

23

ACN has 4 flat peaches available for next year. Galaxy, Saturn, TangOs and BuenOs. Another PYO grower not too far from me has Galaxy for sale now, so I guess they do OK in my climate. Any suggestions on the best of these 4 choices?

24

Looks like Harvester has pretty low chill hours. Has that ever been a problem for you? I don’t see it listed in the Vaughn or Cumberland Valley catalog. Where did you get your trees?

25

Blueberry,

As I mentioned TangOs and BuenOs are problematic to grow. 3 of my BuenOs trees died and the flavor is really sub-par.

TangOs has a good flavor but I’ve had a couple years where the fruit is extremely spotty to the point it’s unmarketable, unless you have some customers who don’t care about appearance. I’m definitely not replacing the BuenOs which died and don’t plan to add any more TangOs.

I’ve decided I do have a Saturn peach. Warmxrules indicated Saturn is small and Galaxy is huge. The tree in question produces fairly large flat peaches (indicative of Galaxy). The fruit also ripens before Redhaven, which corresponds to Galaxy based upon Adams County peach schedule. However, according to Rutgers, Galaxy is supposed to ripen after Redhaven and Saturn ripens before.

The real identifier though comes from the patent Saturn pp# 5123. According to the description, the flowers are showy (which matches my tree) and the leaf glands are reniform (which again matches my tree).

According to the info on Galaxy from the release description, Galaxy has non-showy blooms and the leaf glands are round (both of which do not match my tree).

http://hortsci.ashspublications.org/content/40/6/1921.full.pdf

The tree was labeled as a Saturn and that’s what I have.

All that said, I really like the tree based upon this one year. However Galaxy is supposed to be an improvement over Saturn in terms of brix and less picking damage, so I don’t think you could go wrong with Saturn or Galaxy.

As for picking peaches, we don’t have a very high tech way to do it, but the way we do it seems to work.

We pick in what we call crates. They are plastic crates which stack on top of one another. These type of black crates used to hold flower bulbs. There are several different heights of crates, we have the short ones. We lay folded up towels in the bottom of the crates so the peaches won’t get bruised from the plastic flooring of the crates. Plus the towels help keep the peaches from rolling around so much. We don’t stack the peaches, but just place them one layer deep.

Here is a pic of one of the taller plastic crates. Ours are a bit shorter than this one:

26

Harvester is listed in the Cumberland Valley catalog. That’s where I bought mine.
I’ve never had a problem with the chill hours, which are 750.

27

Found it! I was looking in the wrong place. Looks like it ripens after Redhaven but before Winblo.

28

Scott

Did you see this video from the Peach Doctor at Clemson?

He calls Winblo the Perfect Peach. He is right on based on my limited experience growing peaches.

https://youtu.be/t2sh7TeM90E?t=1m55s

29

We finished picking all of the Winblo and about 1/2 of the Contenders. Both are excellent peaches for my climate and the peaches look and taste very similar. Most people (including myself) could not tell the difference in a blind taste test. My Winblo are slightly larger, but the fruit set on the Contender was better. It was not apparent during bloom when the 23 degree freeze hit, but I believe the high chill hours (1050) on the Contender delayed he bloom slightly which helped with the freeze. I was told to expect about 1/2 bu per tree on these year 3 trees, but the yield on the Contender’s is closer to a bushel and a half per tree. We have a lot more peaches than we expected, so we had to drop the bushel price to sell them! We are rookies at growing peaches and apples, but the peaches are working much better than expected. Hopefully we can do better with the apples next year and get some of our money back on the 800 trees and trellis.

Help me pick a peach tree
30

Rick,
Just curious. What did you do trellis-wise?

Mike

31

12 foot post with 4 wires. Post are about 2.5 feet in the ground, so the top wire is about 9.5 feet tall.

32

Rick,

Please send some photos of the trellis system when you get a chance

Mike

33

Mike

I don’t have any pictures, but my trellis looks like the one in the video, but I did not use the conduit. The best explanation I have seen is in this video, by the expert in the field. There is a whole series of these video from the apple school in NC taught by T Robinson from Cornell. I wish I had the chance to view these video before I made the investment in my orchard.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eIDZeKCQQE

34

Mike

The conversation moved from peaches to apples on a trellis, but I found a picture of my trellis. Goldrush on B9, top of the trellis is about 9 1/2 feet.

960×697 178 KB

1 Like
35

how far apart are the posts blueberry?

36

50 feet. I did not know it when I set the post, but 30 feet is the suggested spacing

37

Olpea

We purchased the Macro-Totes I spoke about and used them a few weeks ago. We use the shoulder strap which clips to the tote so we can pick with both hands. We place the peaches several layers deep, so that the tote holds about 1/3 bushel. We were happy to find that the these totes stack 6 to a level in our Garden Way “Type” cart so we can get 18 totes in the cart and push to the truck. Our rows are only 125 feet so its not far to the truck. Once we move the truck out of the field we move the totes with a hand truck to the cooler or the farm stand. We hope to do something similar with the Apples. Its no where near as efficient as the big boys who use bulk bins, but its a lot better than picking in buckets or cardboard berry flats like we were doing .

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38

If someone can find a nursery that will ship a Winblo to California, I will write you the sweetest, most heartfelt thank you that you have ever seen.

39

Vintage Virginia Apples shipped them to CA a couple years ago.

40

Thanks Blueberry. Because we pick some peaches fairly soft I don’t think the totes would work for me. I like to put some soft and some firm peaches in each box I sell so people can eat some peaches right away and still have some ripen slowly over the following days. Because we sell some soft peaches I’d be afraid they would get bruised if we stacked them in totes.