peach blossom

[qahtan]

this is part of the enormous cloud of peach blossoms in this area at the moment, the clouds vary in the shades of pink to the variety of peaches, also pear, apricot, cherry, apple, and numerous other fruits in bloom, it truly is a beautiful sight to see. This is all in the Niagara Peninsula where I live....qahtan

[Penny]

Thanks for sharing, that is so pretty.

[blueadzuki]

Your lucky my one peach tree is (it apperars) already done flowering and it will be a few weeks till I can tell if any of the flowers took.

Actually while we talk of peaches, There someting about my tree that has always bugged me. My tree is tecnically an ornamental peach, probably Hiawatha (at least that the only one online I ever saw that shared mine's dark purple leaves) Last year to my delight it finally got old enough to produce blossoms. To my astonisment many of those blossoms turned into peaches and four made it to full ripness. Now here the part that has confused me. as I said this tree is the only peach tree I have and to my knowedge, no one in my neigborhood has a peach tree either. At the time I was under the impression that all peaches were self infertile (I have since learned that some are some aren't) Does anyone know if Hiawatha is one of those that is self fertile, or, if not, could one of the other stone fruits on our property have done the deed (we have no other stone fruit trees we eat from at the moment, but we have two weeping cherries and a few chokecheries on our property.) I'm toying with plant the four pits from the four ripe fruits next year and wan some clue what my odds are that the resulting trees will be sometihng I'd actually be willing to eat from.

[keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.)]

I'm pretty sure most are self fertile.

But of course i think they need lots of bee's to pollinate them. Next year try pollinating some your self. Be careful though, they are sometimes fragile. And here in colorado we have problems of the blossoms freezing in early spring from snowstorms. So, we hardly get any on our tree. But, when a few peaches do grow.. they are the sweetest peaches ever.

They wont be pollinated by Cherry trees or Choke Cherry trees. But, they might be pollinated by plum, apricot, or nectarine trees if any are nearby.

[grunt]

They are doing deliberate crosses of peaches with other stone fruit, and all of the results are edible, some more so than others, depending on the individual varieties. I would say plant them. at the very least, you will get more peach trees.

[blueadzuki]

Jun 20, 2010 1:06:28 GMT -5 grunt said:

They are doing deliberate crosses of peaches with other stone fruit, and all of the results are edible, some more so than others, depending on the individual varieties. I would say plant them. at the very least, you will get more peach trees.

I will. BTW the tree has produced another 4 fruit this year (that's proably the maximum it can hold, at least till we can get it into the actual ground and let it grow a bit more easily (it currenly resides in a giant planter, the kind made from an old whisky barrel. but we are planning to stick it in the ground this autumn winter, as soon as it goes dormant again) so there will be 8 pits now.
Actually any progeny in future years is going to potentially look REALLY odd, since, thnaks to a trip to the local Japanese grocery store, I got my hands on a quantity of Prunus mume fruits, and saved all of the pits (currently sitting in a container of water until the last of the fruit bits rot off and can be removed. Assuning insects (or me) manage a sucessful crossbreed I could wind up with soemthing really impressive, the peaches dark purple leaves and a mume's incredible blossoms, and If i'm very very lucky the fuit will still be edible (regretably it turns out that these mume plums even if you do get ripe ones, taste absoultey awful in thier raw umpicked state (and I really don't like pickled plums) I have heard that there are mume's that are suiable to eat has hand fruit, but these clearly aren't they.)

[atash]

Jun 20, 2010 1:06:28 GMT -5 grunt said:

They are doing deliberate crosses of peaches with other stone fruit, and all of the results are edible, some more so than others, depending on the individual varieties. I would say plant them. at the very least, you will get more peach trees.

Peaches cross with almonds. The trees look similar, though I would say peach trees are prettier. It seems to me if you did enough crosses, you should be able to get "sweet kernel peaches".

Peaches are probably about the most ornamental stone fruit; they have very attractive glossy slightly recurved leaves not to mention the fruit and flowers also highly ornamental. But one of the commonest cultivars, Redhaven, has deformed blossoms. Some of its progeny seem to have the same defect.

Nectarines are the same species; the differences are caused by a genetic mutation, which, oddly, tends to shift the flavor slightly as well as cause the fruit to be fuzz-less. Some people prefer the more "vinous" taste of Nectarine. Also, oddly, it compromises coldhardiness. Peaches tolerate more cold than Nectarines do.

The mutation can go both ways, so that Nectarines occasionally spontaneously mutate back into Peaches!!

I would love to grow Peaches...but alas, increasingly rainy springs are dooming them. Peaches (and Nectarines) EXCEEDINGLY vulnerable to peach-leaf curl. It can kill young trees. Mine are on their last legs.

The books all say to spray them, but that's ridiculous. I could not keep the spray on if I sprayed them every day; it washes right off in the rain!! Better bet would be to grow resistant cultivars and try getting them established well enough. But university research stations keep releasing "peach-leaf curl resistant varieties" that aren't, including the losers I bought--which are derived from Redhaven, obviously--look exactly like it complete with the same ugly deformed blossoms and total lack of resistance to peach leaf curl.

[plantsnobin]

I noticed a peach tree down the road from me the other day that had already ripening peaches, so I stopped and got a few. It's an abandoned place and the lady who would have planted the tree is no longer living so no way to find out what it is. But anyway, I almost decided not to bring any home because they mostly had some type of rot, but I liked the early ripening aspect. Got them home, cut them open and one had an almond looking kernal. Most of the other pits were deformed, with a worm eating them. But that one really has my curiosity up. Went to get more yesterday, I could only reach 3, and they all had the deformed looking pits. I will keep trying, but I am too chicken to try eating the almond looking one, assuming I find anymore like that.

[atash]

They look like almonds because they're related. They contain a TINY amount of cyanide, so people are usually warned away from eating them, but I don't think it's a significant amount, and some people do regularly eat stone-fruit "nuts".

(The famed Hunzas of Pakistan eat so many apricots and probably the pits too, they end up with elevated levels of cyanide in their blood. But they apparently build up resistance to it. In any case reputedly long-lived and healthy).

I'm glad you brought up that rot. What's with all the store-bought peaches that rot from the inside-out? What disease is that? I haven't seen it on home-grown peaches (knock on wood) but it seems to be ubiquitous among store-bought. I am afraid to buy peaches anymore, because so many of them look fine on the outside, but when you open them up, they're rotten around the pit.

[blueadzuki]

Jun 21, 2010 12:22:55 GMT -5 atash said:

(The famed Hunzas of Pakistan eat so many apricots and probably the pits too, they end up with elevated levels of cyanide in their blood. But they apparently build up resistance to it. In any case reputedly long-lived and healthy).

Yes but bear in mind those are "sweet pit" apricots (at least the Hunza apricots that I see in the stores are), they ALREADY have diminshed quanties of cyanogenic glucosides (technically, it doesn't become the free cyanide ion (which is the one that is poisonous) until it is broken down)) A lot of Apricot strains from around Asia and the Mediterranean region are and thier pits have been used as an almond substitute for millenia (amararetto (and by extension amaretti biscotti) is traditinally made from sweet apricot pits (though almonds are more common now) as are many almond based chinese treats (orginally almond cookies were apricot kernel cookies) I'm not saying that the cyanide tolerance isn't real (it is) but the per unit cyanide dose is a lot smaller( I imagine that, if you lived on tons and tons of almonds (or ate a couple of pounds of marzipan every day), you blood level would show a similar elevated cyanide level) I'd no more eat the pit of an apricot whose ancestry I did not know than I would wander into the orchards of someone I KNEW grew bitter almonds pluck a handful off a random tree, and pop them in my mouth.

[atash]

Bitter almonds smell better than the real thing. Cyanide, for those who don't know, smells like bitter almonds (I'm pretty sure that is a coincidence! Bitter almond extract is more likely a ketone, not that I know anything about chemistry; just guessing), but some people from Europe and India (India as a result of the Aryan invasions) have "smell blindness" to cyanide.

I would love to have sweet-pit apricot, but I don't think any have been bred yet suitable for my climate. They might be OK but Apricots in general need climates with strongly-defined climates where the seasons change decisively when the warm fronts hit in spring. Otherwise, they are apt to bloom too early then get frosted.

There are a few regular Apricots bred for my climate, but the one I bought was a disaster: the graft wasn't done right and died. Interestingly though until that happened, it was healthier than the peaches. Apricots don't seem to mind rainy springs as bad as Peaches do. Beautiful trees themselves, and their flowers are deliciously fragrant.

[blueadzuki]

Jun 21, 2010 23:13:19 GMT -5 atash said:

Bitter almonds smell better than the real thing. Cyanide, for those who don't know, smells like bitter almonds (I'm pretty sure that is a coincidence! Bitter almond extract is more likely a ketone, not that I know anything about chemistry; just guessing), but some people from Europe and India (India as a result of the Aryan invasions) have "smell blindness" to cyanide.

Actually that characteristic "bitter almond odor" is caused by an aromatic aldehyde, benzaldehyde to be specific. The cyanide connection is due to the fact that when Amygdalin (the glucoside in apricot and other related fruit kernels is broken down by enzymes(say in digestion or decay) it makes a mixture of benzaldehyde, glucose, and hydrocynaic acid which evaporates into gaseous hydrogen cyanide at appx 26C (79F) (so it probably isnt a good idea to sit around with a lot of ground up bitter almond or apricot pits on a hot day) Guess that means that if out body temperatures were a little lower cyanide wouldn't be as dangerous to us (maybe that's how some birds are immune) Then again if our blood oxygenation method wasn't metal ion based, cyanide wouldn't affect us AT ALL (that's how cyanide works, it bonds with the iron ions in the walls of the mitocondria and messes up the ATP cycle) I keep thinking of the aliens Issac Asimov had in his short story "Hostess" who had metal ion free blood, and consequently needed cyanide for thier metabolism (Asimov was a professor of biochemisty as well as a Science Fiction writer, so this is probably scientifically sound)

[nuts]

My 'peche de vigne' is resistant to leaf curl.
The first leafs,that grow in cooler,wet wether have symptoms of it,but later on this dissapears.
The peaches are not so big and ripens somewhat lately but are delicious(in my climate).
This years the weather during bloom was very good so there is lots of fruits.
They are usually propagated by the pits.
4 or 5 years after planting,there can be fruits.
Don't hesitate to remind me in september anyone who is interested by the pits.