On one edge of our
land is a driveway. Between the driveway and the
fence is a weedy grass strip of easement under the power lines, and then a sort of neglected hedgerow about six feet deep.
Before I lived here full time, I would visit in the winter. And my spouse one day (this was five to seven years ago) pointed out an ice-damaged, broken, mostly-dead tree she said was a peach her father had planted many years ago.
She no longer remembers pointing out the tree to me, although she does remember her father "trying to grow fruit trees".
Fast forward. A few years later we started living here full time, and coming up on two years ago I started getting interested in the fruit and nut
trees on this property (mostly pecans, persimmons, and plums, but also including one ancient domestic Keiffer pear tree.) At some point I went and looked at the peach tree spot, but the only tree there was ice-broken, fallen down, and long dead. The whole area has grown up into a bramble the size of two parked cars, with the main bramble being some sort of wild-ish climbing thorny vine in the
rose family. It's very daunting and inaccessible. Since the tree I was interested in was very dead, I said "someday I'll have to clear all that bramble out of there" and went on about my business.
Over time I've gotten better and better at spotting wild and feral fruit trees. You learn what they look like, you learn when they flower, you just train your eye with practice. And about a year ago, a friend gave me the
gift of some nursery fruit trees, including one peach. I planted it in a good spot and watched it closely as it struggled with
deer browse and last summer's dry spells. I became very familiar with what a young peach tree looks like.
And thus, at some point last year, I was standing in the driveway when something clicked and I said "Hey! That random brushy tree growing up out of that bramble pile looks like my peach tree!" So I took a closer look and sure
enough, it was a
volunteer peach tree taller than me, about six feet from where the old tree had stood. That got me peering into the bramble and I was able to notice two more much smaller peach seedlings struggling in there as well. Clearing away the bramble and liberating those trees got bumped up my priority list, but with hand tools it's an ugly job and I didn't get around to it.
Well, finally this spring the largest of the volunteer peaches -- now about eight feet tall -- exploded with a huge crop of blossoms, which caught my attention and reminded me that these trees needed attention. So I got my machete and my loppers, put on heavy gloves and a protective long-sleeve shirt, and got to work.
This turned out to be one of those "can't get there from here" jobs because the only place to stack the brush and trimmings is along the
fence, which itself needed clearing of some dead Eastern Red Cedars and random shrubbery. So I ended up hacking all the way around the bramble before I ever even attacked it, and at one point I found myself standing at a new vantage point and ... hey! Isn't that three more peach saplings buried there in the other side of the bramble?
Sure enough. And then when I got all the way to the fence and was standing taking a breather and looking at the bramble on the neighbor's side of the fence: "Hey! Isn't that three MORE peach trees just on the neighbor's side of the fence?" Yes, yes it was.
The moral here is that no matter how many times you stare at a thicket, you don't learn what's really growing in it until you attempt to take it apart with hand tools. Elbow grease pays off here. (This is not the first time I've found small but potentially valuable trees while clearing brush.)
At this point I have still only removed about half the bramble. But when I got to the base of one of the places where all the vines were erupting out of the ground, I found a whole cache or trove of about two dozen peach pits, all in a pile as if a small animal crouched in that one "safe spot" at the heart of the bramble to eat foraged peaches. The pits themselves do not look particularly old. How long do peach pits stay whole and fresh-looking (not black or discolored) under a thick bush?
And considering how many of them germinated in place, just how long do they stay viable? I could not resist the temptation to plant all these pits in a couple of nursery beds, so perhaps I'll find out.
I'm up to a total of six discovered trees on our property and four more just over the fence on the neighbor's side. Two of our trees are very small (stunted by bramble competition, or just young) and too near the larger ones; so I may well transplant and relocate them at a suitable time.
The big mystery to me is those pits. Do they date from when the main tree was alive and making fruit? (At least five years ago, more likely six or seven years ago.) Or did one of the young trees (possibly the older one on the neighbor's land) make a crop more recently? If so, it wasn't the largest one that I had already noticed last year; I looked at it quite closely and it didn't bear fruit last summer. (We had a hard and slightly late frost that disrupted a lot of fruit production locally.)
At any case, I'm rather tickled to have found a whole volunteer peach orchard, with genetics that have produced at least one crop of peaches under my
local conditions without any care or attention whatsoever. That's the kind of peaches I want to grow!
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