Peaches right off the tree are wonderful. You can grow one or two peach trees with a little effort if you have sandy loam or sandy soil. They do not grow well in clay soils because the roots drown.
Before You Buy
Before starting your orchard, it is important to find out what your average chilling hours are in your area. This will guide you in what variety of peach you plant. If you plant one that needs more or less chilling hours than you receive, bad things happen.
Planting Your Peaches
Most people buy one or two year old trees. Plant them in a hole and use the dirt that came out of the hole to fill it. If you put compost or other soil amendments in the hole, the roots get lazy and circle in the hole, girdling the tree. Your tree might survive for a few years, but then will die.
Prune At Planting
When you plant your tree, trim the top third of the branches off. If you buy small bare root trees, this may have already been done for you by the nursery. This procedure keeps the roots from working so hard to feed all this foliage that they cannot grow themselves and anchor the plant in the ground.
Pruning Each Year
You will have to prune your tree every year. There are tomes written about how to prune a peach tree. Basically, if a branch or stem points up, you leave it. If it points down, it goes. You want to develop two or three strong branches that then branch into two or three more sections, and so on. If the branch is not strong enough, it will break under the load of the peaches. Be careful when pruning. It is easy to raise up into a tree branch and clock yourself.
Remove Fruit From Young Trees
It is not unusual for third and fourth year trees to bear fruit. Sometimes they bear so much fruit their branches break. It is recommended that when the fruit gets big enough for you to see it, you pinch every last one of them off. This allows the tree to concentrate on growing those two years instead of having fruit.
Thin The Fruit For Nice Peaches
From the fifth year on, the tree will be strong enough to have peaches. However, you will still need to thin the fruit to one every six inches. This allows each peach to develop into a large, healthy fruit. It also makes sure there are not so many peaches in any one place that a branch breaks. Broken branches are not only unsightly, but can seriously injure the tree. You also lose the peaches on them.
Spraying For Diseases And Pests
Peaches require more sprays than anything but cotton. In December, you have to spray with dormant oil for scale. This starts a cycle of spraying something every week or two until the peaches are harvested. Recommendations on when to spray and what spray to use change, so you need to consult your Extension office for a schedule of peach sprays applicable to your area. You can grow peaches organically, but you often lose most of the crop to diseases and pests.
Growing your own peaches can be a lot of work, but the payoff is nice, juicy peaches.
