It’s supposed to be a warm winter( 2023/2024), but I have no single flower on my in ground peach trees. This includes in general
the bulletproof Red Heaven and other 20+ hardy, less hardy cultivar. Most damages were done not just to the flower buds, but also the leaf buds.
It is worst winter damage I have seemed. Back in 2016? When we had record low -30 that winter, I still had one peach .
Furthermore, I had a lot of J plums branches with full dead flower spurs and no sign of leaves.
Surprisingly, E plums thrive this year. It looks like the temperature pattern is much agreeable with the E plums. Or maybe E plums are much more bud hardy than J plums.
Hardiness zones are quite misleading for fruit trees. If the trees stay alive, but flower buds are all dead, what does that do good for us.
So far, I my climate, I found Shiro, Toka, Superior, lavina, are quite bud hardy;
What else cultivar you find are bud hardy in your area, or not hardy?
That seems to be a common theme in the midwest this year with Peaches. A a lot of talk about that in the Upper Midwest Regional Chat. Rather than the cold it was probably the sporadic up-and-down temps we had this year. For me I think also the winds with warmer temps and lack of moisture this winter. A lot of the peach fruiting buds seemed desiccated.
For me, the Polly White Peach is the only peach this year that actually had fruit buds survive. It was supposedly a chance seedling from Iowa so it’s cold hardier. It’s a sweeter, white sub-acid peach though. Not your typical strong peach flavor.
They desiccate like popcorn AFTER they freeze. Here in west Texas peach buds don’t freeze in winter and don’t desiccate no matter how dry and windy. We know dry and windy. Like below zero dew points and 60 mph winds. I grew up in northern IL. No comparison.
I see. None of them look liked popcorn for sure. Just really dry and brittle. Do you think large swings between cold and warm would affect that? They’re established trees that normally can handle our cold winter but they didn’t flower this year after a mild winter. I’m pretty sure we had enough chill hours though, just a lot of temp swings.
The varieties that didn’t flower for me, but normally do, are:
Redhaven
Reliance
Contender
Stellar Blazing Star
Avalon Pride
Polly White is the only variety that did flower.
Galaxy peach didn’t flower either but it can never handle our cold. That’s not unusual. I really need to do something else with that tree.
We are definitely windy here also. Iowa is second in the country in wind generation after Texas, and we have about 5 times less land than Texas. We’re usually not as dry though. Dry, warm and windy is a deadly combination which is what made me think that might be the issue.
Whatever the cause it definitely seems pretty common here in the upper midwest this year. Hopefully it’s a one-off type of year.
Large swings in temperature can certainly be bad. A warmup in winter reduces flower bud hardiness. Any freeze thereafter can be an issue.
We get large temperature swings but that alone has never caused bud damage because we seldom drop below 10F.
Even in Amarillo which is colder than here there was very seldom bud damage with single digit below zero. A very rare -12F did do some damage. That was one winter in 30.
One issue that can bite in areas like IL with good chilling is that trees can come out of dormancy early. After trees break dormancy, they can be damaged by above zero cold.
With stone fruit, it’s not the winter lows that get you, but spring frosts. Warm winters can exacerbate problems with late or even normal for the season frosts, as the trees don’t stay asleep as long as they should. Hardiness zones aren’t misleading for fruit trees; they’re just giving you a reasonable estimate of whether the plant will survive the winter. Whether it produces anything has very little to do with hardiness zones.
We’ve had an unusually mild spring (knock on wood). I’m going to get some plums that I normally don’t like Santa Rosa. So it’s been good for some fruit. Peaches haven’t been happy though. I guess you can’t expect everything to do well every year. Just plant a lot of different stuff, right!
In past, the later frost is the big issue, but not this year. Buds were not even swelling this year, the flowers were all dead. Damages had already done before the later frost arrives
Agreed. That’s what I’ve been seeing as well this year. They didn’t even try to bloom. They were DOA by the time spring arrived. I think @fruitnut is right. They must have briefly broken dormancy at some point over the winter with our unusual warm spells, and then bit the dust when it got cold again.
Yeah, the warm winters basically move “spring” much earlier as far as the trees are concerned. So what wouldn’t be a problematic low in February or March most years becomes a bud killer.
This is precisely what happened to my flavor delight aprium. the entire tree was loaded with flower buds but they just got crumbly after a cold snap for couple of days. The tree tried to put out a few weak green tips here and there before I put it in the yard debris container.
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