Good input. Maybe I should call and see if any ag colleges are aware of any wild peaches in the deep south. I’ve covered a lot of ground and never seen or heard of one.
iNaturalist lists around 1000 (presumably non-cultivated) peaches observed in Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, and the Carolinas. People sometimes fail to distinguish between cultivated and feral in their reporting. Many of the reports occur in the middle of a forest.
3 Likes
“Very small fruits with exceptional flavor” sounds like it’s just begging to be crossed with something delicious that has large fruits.
What a great entry Rylan.
I’m growing quite some peach trees, the F1’s have given tons of fruit this year. A couple of hundred seeds i’ve planted. Just some varieties that grew at thé house already.
Nothing fancy.
But you’ve just opened a whole new universe for me there with those Californian plant breeders. Zaiger’s is doing great work.
Gets me thinking. If i as a hobby farmer could grow their trees out, and many of us would help we’d add to the 50.000 trees a year these pioneers grow to find two to five great varieties which they consider keepers…
Do they ship to Europe? Anyone knows?
And are there plantbreeders who do the same with apple’s and pears??
I’ve become less fuzzy about spots and insectdamage since i’ve learned the healing scabs the tree produces containers loads of components which work in our bodies as health improvers, even anti cancer agents i read somewhere.
How fascinating to learn that this breeding work is confusing insects and diseases so it’s the best way to stop using cides. What if many professional growers would switch to growing these new exciting varieties?
I loved the talk between these three breeders, much confirmation of what i suspected, but that helps me be confident.
2 Likes
Steven Edholm is doing some awesome, awesome things with apple breeding.
I’ve started obsessively watching his YouTube videos about tasting his own seedling apples. Some of them sound extremely delicious. I really hope I can buy some scionwood or seeds from him in spring. (Things tend to sell out quickly.)
3 Likes
(Steeples fingers.) Can peach pollen be frozen for a few weeks, by any chance?
If so, that might be a great way to pollinate the wild ones with domesticated pollen. It sounds like the wild ones’ late-blooming habits are also preferable for your climate.
Oh! Have you ever considered trying a snow mulch? (Luke Marion recommended it in his book The Autopilot Garden.) He said if you pile up all the snow you shovel around your fruit trees that have a tendency to flower too early, the soil will stay cold for longer, so they will break dormancy later, so they’ll be at less risk of having all the blossoms freeze off. That seems like a great idea worth trying.
In one of the Zaiger videos I watched they dried the pollen the same day they collected it and they said it would last a year in a container unfrozen and another year frozen.
I thought it was interesting that Floyd Zaiger said he worked for a guy named Anderson, who he said was Luther Burbank’s main worker.
From seed we grow almonds, apples, apricots, chestnuts, peaches, pears, pecans, plums, nectarines, oaks, sweet and sour cherries, walnuts in trees and black currant, chokeberry, elder, goji, gooseberry, jostaberry in smaller size. We are trying others as well. Tree seeds are sown in air pruning beds or chitted over winter then sown direct or in forestry tubes. The soft fruits we just sow into pots, prick out then plant when big enough.
It’s early days and so far only the peaches have been in long enough to fruit and peaches almost always produce decent fruit from seed.
2 Likes
This year, I’m trying to winter sow lots of fruit trees from seed. I have put the seeds in large pots, with lots of nice home-made compost and native soil. My hope is that by putting them in pots, I’ll know what they are when they sprout. (Wry grin.) I figure if they need cold stratification, sticking them in pots in winter is the easiest way to do that, and they won’t take up any precious space inside.
As a tip, in case it works, because I think it will, this is how I labeled the pots.
Each pot is labeled with a big letter of the alphabet that I cut out of cardboard. I shoved that into the gap between the soil and the edge of the pot. Then I wrote down in my spreadsheet what each letter means, just in case I forget. But I also tried to make the letters intuitive.
B = beautyberries
G = goumi berries
Q = quince
etc.
I’m sure the cardboard will get rained on and snowed on all winter, but my suspicion is that those compostable tags will still be decipherable in the spring, which is all I need.
No plastic, no marker that might fade, nothing complicated. Just cardboard cut-outs. I only need the tags until the seedlings sprout; then I can carefully dig them out and plant them wherever I want those bushes or trees.
1 Like
I planted cherry, almond, plum and apricot seeds in the ground last week. Mixed varieties, but mostly from a climate with a much longer winter (Utah) so I’m hoping they will have a different cycle built in.
Last summer no plum seedlings survived. Only 1 cherry seedling. 7 apricot and 6 peach. I am hoping planting them straight into the ground rather than transplanting after the last frost will result in a higher survival rate.
The almonds were interesting. I thought none of them had survived. I went out to plant almond seeds, and kept running across almond seedlings buried in the grass. There are at least 4, possibly 6 survivors! They had all grown sideways, along the soil. Not sure why, but everything that grew upright died.
This week I need to do apple, pear and peach seeds. These are all domesticated varieties. When I ask people around here about feral fruit trees, they usually tell me that fruit trees don’t grow here.
Balderdash. 
2 Likes
Osage orange grows great there! But on a serious note, I think plums will grow there. There’s a certain type of plum that makes a plum thicket. I just ordered some Oikos tree crop seeds labeled Wild Texas Peach and he sent me some seeds free called Wild Goose Plum, prunus hortulana. That seems to fit the bill, native to the midwest, so maybe try those out. Then again if you’re close to Kansas City you probably have way more options than if you’re out west.
I just found out yesterday that we have wild horses a couple parishes over from where I live. Totally blew my mind. If we have wild horses we probably have a wild peach tree somewhere. The problem would be getting to it. The wild horses are mostly on Army land, in one of their bombing ranges. Wondering if that’s the place to look. I don’t know of any virgin timber in North Louisiana. Every tree has been cut many times over. That’s what makes it so hard to find something like feral fruit trees here. Still, my search has just started so there’s a chance there’s one out there.
If you haven’t already, check out this website:
Just in case someone in your area has found one already, and marked it on the map.
1 Like
Hi Lauren. If your seedlings dont survive summer it might be worth growing in half shade.
I’ve had good succès with my passive trèe nursery shaded out by oak trees. They do get morning sun and evening sun which garantees their growth.
My trees don’t get as big as many people have them after a year, but as high as my belly is no exception.
Anyway i dig them out in autumn and then give them their final destination. I take special care not to cut the pen root thé side roots often get cut.
I use a drainage shovel. 4 inch blade wide , much more effective digging than thèse crazy wide shovels they sell for gardens. The blade is much longer as well. I can dig square deep holes easily and fill them with compost/soil mix.
But i’m moving away from that.
I want slow growth, fewer leaves during the year, means slow évaporation, means less watering.
So now i just make a deep cut, wiggle it open with thé handle, which i replaced after breaking with a fresh ash tree branch. And get that pen root as deep into the hole as possible. Mulch with straw.
Anyway. Works for me. Hope this helps.
I am growing trees from seeds. Apples, mandarines, oranges, carob, acorn, olives, grapes. All seeds that I can get my hands on. Currently, the success rating is very low (<5%).
Did you try some shade growing?
Shade growing sounds like a neat idea. I’m thinking that is something I want to try. Partial shade is so much better for water retention in the soil during my hot summers, so I would love to use my partial shade spaces for less drought tolerant fruit trees.
I’ve been out planting seeds in the passive shaded tree nursery.
So to pure south are trees, in summer the young trees get morning and evening sun. In rainy times the higher ground gets saturated and floods the ditch to the side.
Water is close by at a point where it was dug a few feet deep. It’s rarely needed.
I’ve surrounded the plot with cuttings of blackberry and redcurrant. As well in between the seedbeds. When i started to dig in a hundred what seeds of prunes, peaches or chestnut or whatever i separated with a line of cuttings.
Happy with this shadegrowing!
I have 6 peach trees, 7 apricot, several almond, 1 cherry that all survived the summer. I didn’t water them. We’ll see how many survive the winter (very mild so far) and the spring.
I think the cherry seedlings want to be big, so I may end up transplanting them.
Nice! DId you direct seed them, or start them in pots?