Peaches: An underrated fruit?

"If you don't like my peaches, then don't shake my tree" - Unknown

As an American, when I hear the word peaches I think of good ole Georgia in the south. I have however found out that peaches can grow in all sorts of climates! Color me surprised when I found out that there are cultivars that do amazing in upstate New York. Peach trees are reported to be a short lived tree (twenty to thirty years) but there has been plenty of exceptions to the rule. Personally, I have started several years back planting a few peach trees around my property with great growth on each. I am growing 'Contender', 'Reliance', and 'Elberta' if my memory is correct.

Do you grow peaches? Any tips or tricks for success? Any lessons learned?

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I have planted both potted and bare root peaches with good success. I make it a point to make a ring of chicken wire around the trees in winter when they are small to prevent rabbits and deer from nibbling the bark. I lost one tree to rabbits and won't have that happen again.

I have been mulching the trees out to their drip line with woodchip that has been inoculated with fungi. I have not pruned my trees and have been getting great growth out of them. I had one tree produce a handful of peaches last year so I'm eager to see how this year goes.

Hi Timothy,

I have to somewhat respectfully disagree--I find nothing underrated about peaches!  I absolutely LOVE peaches!

Also, my native Southern Illinois has an amazing crop of absolutely juicy, sweet, mouth-watering peaches each summer.  I absolutely love having peaches in season.  We will go the local farmers market and come back with a half-bushel of peaches, some of which my wife will turn into cobbler, and the other half is simply eaten in slices right off the pit!

Growing up, I always thought of peaches as being mediocre--and maybe this is where I might agree with you that peaches are underrated--because they were typical grocery store peaches that were bred for store longevity and not taste.  But when I started tasting fresh Southern Illinois peaches, I was amazed.  I actually had a friend who lived not far from Chattanooga, TN and he asked me if I had ever tasted a Georgia peach, implying that I had never really tasted a peach unless I tasted one from Georgia.  I countered by asking him if he had ever tasted a Southern Illinois peach.  He was a bit surprised when I told him just how amazing they taste!

Short version, I LOVE PEACHES!

Eric

If I lived in the deep south like you, Tim, I'd grow peaches for sure! ;-)

When I was two or three, I planted two peach pits right up against the cinderblock foundation of our southern California rental. By the time we moved away from that house when I was eight, we had a couple of six-foot trees that bore a small load of peaches every summer. That's really all I know about them, but they don't seem too fussy based on that.

When I lived in Georgia in peach country, I found the worms (plum curculio I think) pretty much ruined them most years.  That is, until I started running chickens under the trees!  It was a pretty big flock, 50 layers or more, in a small orchard of maybe 1/4 acre....so enough that they kept the ground scratched bare and I had to lock them out to grow a cover crop etc.  But they ate every fruit that hit the ground, including it's content of insects, and so interrupted the life cycle year after year.  Eventually I could get 75% worm free fruit on early varieties, organically.  Even the extension people that came out to see were impressed....this was in the '90's....I think now more people use Surround and maybe some other sprays that work pretty good?

We bought our place, including a small ( nearly 2000m2), neglected, OLD orchard. Cherries, apples, pears, plums, grapevine...and peaches!
The first year we were hopefully looking at the bounty of fruit ripening on the trees but... all the stone fruit was infected by insects.
So we ate some, with a knife to be on the safe side - the peaches were super juicy and sweet, heavenly!

We had pigs the first and the second summer and gave any fallen, damaged fruit to the pigs. They didn't complain
We also have chicken free ranging, they can access everything except the greenhouse and the vegetable garden.
Last year was already better with the fruit, but still some insect contamination, especially where the branches grew (way) too close to eachother.
This winter we've pruned the trees as high as we could get, we'll see what this years' harvest looks like.

But yes, peaches!! I always thought apricots were my favourite fruit, but now it's peaches, SO yummy!

Is there something special about donut peaches?

(source)

Donut Peaches

I have seen a few cultivars that make flat shaped peaches and those peaches are toted as being some of the sweetest fruit. Is there something to it?

Omgosh! Never heard of a doughnut peach! I'll have to be on the lookout when the farmer's market start up. I don't have property yet but I'm looking.

Timothy Norton wrote:Is there something special about donut peaches?

(source)

I have seen a few cultivars that make flat shaped peaches and those peaches are toted as being some of the sweetest fruit. Is there something to it?

Peaches are not underrated by me. My peach trees are the only fruit tree I can rely on.

Donut peaches are special, at least compared to basic store peaches.

Our problem is the false spring and late frost has killed most of the blossoms every year at our old place. We are going to select for late bloomers this time.

The best peaches I ever had were in Virginia. A farmer & his wife gave me a ride & when they dropped me off gave me several peaches from their orchard. No idea what variety they were but I still remember how juicy & flavorful they were.

Bees make superb honey from peace trees. Absolutely amazing taste.

Timothy Norton wrote: inoculated with fungi.

To speed decomp?  Grow mushrooms for eating?  What?  
I love peaches, especially Sun Crest, which grows well in the California Bay Area zone 9b.  Epitaph for a Peach by David Matsumoto anyone?  His prose is almost as tasty as the peaches he champions!

When my wife and I had our first house, the building lot was completely open.
The local high school had evening classes, one of which was sponsored by a nursery and garden center.
The courses ran four weeks, one night per week and a couple hour classes on many things "growies." We opted for home landscaping.
When asked if anyone wanted to provide a plot layout, I laid out the the lot lines, house and garage and elevation "iso" lines.
The instructor took it and ran with it, providing great detail on bushes, windbreaks, fruiting and flowering flora.
One of the suggestions was Reliant peaches. We planted 2 saplings around 30 feet apart.
By the second season, we got 3 ripe fruits. We were told to not harvest them, wait for the following year. So we did.
The following season we had dozens of sweet, juicy, delicious Reliant peaches.
It was only after the first harvest that wife and I discussed the fact - neither one of us liked peaches. Nobody said I wasn't strange...
Thankfully, her father couldn't get enough of them!  
The trees lasted almost 20 years and our family and neighbors enjoyed every last fruit.

Nina Surya wrote:
But yes, peaches!! I always thought apricots were my favourite fruit, but now it's peaches, SO yummy!

Fresh, tree-ripened apricots and peaches. WHO could choose between them?

My peaches are all grown from seeds, originally from grocery store peaches, now some second generation. They are wonderful.

Juicy peaches!  Yum.

My first two peach trees were volunteers growing along the path, where they didn't get enough sun. This is West Virginia, zone 6, on the ridge. One of those small trees produced one fruit one year, a big lovely peach, ripe on the last day of June. My neighbor had several mature peach trees, but two of them produce peaches every year--one year it got down to 12 degrees F while blooming, and the tree still made peaches. But these two trees get brown rot every year, ruining the fruit a week before it's ripe. I've been campaigning to cut them down and burn the wood, so they don't affect others.
Meanwhile, I planted a PF 19-007 in my orchard and moved that little tree that made the super early peach into the orchard where it would get more sun. I consider the earliness a bulwark against brown rot, since hopefully the fruit will be gone by the time any spores arrive. I'm about to plant a third peach, a PF 8 Ball. Here I should explain that PF is for Paul Friday, the developer of this line of peaches, which he calls Flamin' Fury. I think that sounds like a wrestler's name, and PF 19-007 sounds like a robot, so I have suggested Perfect Peach or Voluptuous. Two years later I got my first load of peaches from that tree, and the transplanted one made three (this was last year). My criteria are earliness, brown rot resistance (so far I haven't seen much bug damage) and ideally a large, reddish, freestone peach.
But I also learned some lessons from a peach I transplanted in after it volunteered in my neighbor's garden. It was so vigorous I needed a wheelbarrow to bring it home the same fall--itt was already five feet tall. Within a couple years it was 12 feet tall and loaded with pink flowers. But it produces few fruits, and inferior ones. I just cut it down. It also had a big canker on the trunk, I believe as a result of southwest disease--where black fruit tree bark warms up in the winter sun, on the sunny side, then freezes hard at night, causing cracks that can be invaded by rot organisms. So this cold winter I wrapped rags around the trunks of my other two peach trees to protect from the sun. And I'm thinking I should buy some tobacco to sprinkle around the bases of my fruit trees, as I read that will repel or kill the peach tree borer. But I've also learned to keep things away from the bases of all my fruit trees, so I can see if there is evidence of borers (and to keep winter mice from finding a cozy spot to chew on bark).
It's said that peaches reproduce more true than other fruits, so planting a peach pit is more worthwhile than an apple or pear seed--which will result, years later, in probably inferior apples or pears. But I consider it worthwhile to get already grafted, named varieties likely to produce desired results.
Also note that you need to consider pollination requirements for most fruits, but you can do fine with one peach tree, if that's all you have room for. So I read. Also, they tolerate black walnuts lurking nearby, which apples won't, and pears maybe.
Couple more things--peaches (and most other tree fruits) really need thinning to produce good, full size fruit. I picked 250 little fruits off my Perfect peach last year, and still had 50. And last year I tried using fruit bags to protect my apples, pears and peaches from squirrels and bug damage. These are green nylon net bags with drawstrings which make it easy to put them around fruits. One year is not enough to tell, especially since last year was anomalous--extended drought, so that the bees, wasps and hornets let me know the pears were THEIRS in the heart of the harvest season--but if I get a good fruit set again this spring I'm gonna order another 200 bags. There are several suppliers.

While this thread has primarily been about the fruit, I am now curious about the wood itself.

My peach trees have exploded with growth in recent years and I am curious about uses for the biomass. Does the wood have value? Perhaps for wood turning or for smokers? Anyone have experience with peach wood?

I have been using a wooden peach comb for years and it is very durable.  
I pruned some branches off my 5 year old peach tree. I need to check to see if I can use the wood for carving.