Leonard Moorehead, the Urban Gardener: Peach Blooms are More

Saturday, April 22, 2017

Leonard Moorehead, GoLocalProv Gardening Expert

Fruit trees in bloom are spring’s highlights. Pause urban gardeners. Savor the moment. Life’s fertility is a cloud, a whisper composed of petite white or pink blooms. Bees appear to feast upon golden pollen. Enjoy the bees’ behavior, gaze upon the blossoms. Breath deep. Allow thoughts to reside among the cheerful blooms, extend focus upon distance beyond. Breath, settle feet upon the ground. The busy mind will run onto the fertile blooms, the gardener’s larger parts will fathom beyond. Give yourself time. Peaches are perfect companions for gardeners. A moment, a breath, as in all, we are one. 

Peaches are not difficult to cultivate or maintain and produce abundant crops of nutritious flavorful fruits. Native to the old world, they came to North America with the first European colonists and migrated across the continent. Meet their few but strict requirements and every gardener may begin spring with glorious peach blooms. 

Peaches long association with people reflects the diversity of our cultures. Thousands of cultivars are available; all remain loyal to their origins: open space, day long sunshine and light sandy loam underlain by deep gravel. A soil ph. of 6.5 is optimum, modest variations are tolerable. Peaches are so called “stone fruits”, a thick fuzzy layer of delicious fruit forms around fertile nut like hard kernels. Most gardeners purchase nursery grown saplings that arrive as inconspicuous broomstick “whips” one or two years old and virtually root less. pruned at the nursery for 3 or 4 branches. Open the selected peach tree’s package immediately and soak the bottom overnight in a water bucket. Be gentle. Peaches are inexpensive, long term investments. 

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Prepare the plant site carefully. Dig a hole a few feet around and nearly as deep, place the soil on a burlap bag or tarpaulin. Fill the hole with compost, a handful of bone meal, old mulches and mix with the best topsoil from the excavation laid upon the burlap bag. Tamp down. Situate the sapling upright in the center of the hole, firm the enriched soil around roots and stem, duplicate the easily discerned original soil line, generally speaking the juncture between bark and rooted trunk. Water generously. The soil will settle a bit, add more soil to bring on par with the plant’s trunk and surrounding garden. Drive 3 stakes in triangular formation around each sapling and tie off the sapling with torn t-shirts, strips of burlap bag or multiple strands of jute twine. Take pride in your task. 

Peaches grow fast. Within 7-10 days leaves will form and fresh stems reach into sunlight. Few shrubs or fruits rival elegant peach foliage. The stakes offer stability as the tree’s roots establish a firm anchor for life long support. Remove stakes in the second year. 

Peach trees are abundant and shoulder the heavy weight of 3 to 4 bushels of fruit apiece when mature. Expect a few tokens of hope within the first two summers and brace yourself for enormous crops by the 5th season. Count on blooms each year from the start, keep the ground covered in mulches within the drip line or under the furthest leaves. Don’t mulch against or add soil directly into contact with the bark. A donut shaped nest is what peaches like best. The open gap may be sprinkled with diatomaceous earth or gravelly sand. This technique effectively discourages gnawing mice who thrive in thick winter mulches and soil borne fungi and microorganisms. Peaches do well with precaution rather than noxious chemical cures. 

During cold weather, typically November through bloom in my area, spray with Neem oil or vegetable oils of choice. Since at least Roman times, the peach is known as Malus Persica or Persian Apple after its importation from its homeland in the highlands of the Caucasian mountains, generally speaking today’s eastern Turkey, Iran and Armenia. Likewise, gardeners have mixed copper compounds of very low ratios to oils and coated the dormant trees bark. Renew the sprayed oil after prolonged rainfall, wear a breathing mask and exercise common precaution. Although the fertile stones or in fact, giant seeds are rich in poisonous cyanide, the fleshy fruit and skin are wonderfully nutritious foods. Their taste? The stuff of poetry and legend. 

Oil sprays are basic garden staples. Neem oil or natural vegetable oils penetrate nooks, scars and crannies home to fungus and diseases that disfigure or shrivel fruit. Passive non- toxic oil spray smothers and traps wind-blown spores and larvae. Don’t spray during bloom; the oils will ensnare beneficial pollinating insects such as bees and flying insects essential to good cross pollination. It is better to ignore “self-pollenating”, a truth, and plant at least another peach nearby for better results. The additional blooms, each a nascent peach, increase pollination rates. Seek out peaches that offer crops as early, mid and late season for prolong harvests, usually mid- August through mid- September. 

Keep up with the donut shaped mulch around the trees. Strawberries thrive under peaches for more effective utilization of space and do very well indeed in hay mulches. Keep the sprayers in a secure space away from curious children or careless adults. Do not dump commercial preparations into drains or hidden away in obscure places, their concentrated anti-fungal chemicals are yet another burden for our waterways and precious aquifers. 

Do not be puzzled by the need to prune peaches. Peaches, just as pears, apples and apricots, grow 10-24 inches a year. Often heavily laden with developing fruit, boughs will break under the heavy fruit or be strained by late summer tropical storms. 

Observe peaches from bloom to picking, remove misshapen, infected, or runt fruit and haul away to the compost heap. Many gardeners struggle at this point, isn’t the purpose to harvest as many tasty fruit as possible? Be strong, the remaining peaches will grow larger and be healthier for the additional nutrition from the parent tree. Peaches are ripe when the skin, yields slightly to finger nails. Store in a cool dark place and haul out favorite recipes for jams, jellies or can skinned and pitted fruit. Ripe peaches are divine right off the tree. 

Invite friends to the garden for the peach harvest. Nothing is lovelier than peach trees full of colorful, fragrant fruit. Many windfalls are inevitable. Exercise caution if you cannot keep up with the steady rain of near or fully ripened fruit fallen under the peach trees. Yellow jackets as well as other stinging insects are common in my region. Not only are they attracted to watermelon rinds at the picnic table; they relish the high natural sugar levels in ripe or rotting fruit.  Many unsuspecting gardeners look upward in homage, beneath are defensive stinging insects equipped with strong allogenic stings. Seek immediate medical attention if stung and allergic.  

You are likely, as once I, to find an opossum forage among the peach branches. Our local marsupial is not hostile and famous for passive defense; tolerate their small depredation as a minor nuisance balanced off by their appetite for insects and malevolent larvae. Peaches are truly beautiful, opossum not so much. Tolerance for other life is a virtue; resist wholesale applications of niconoid sprays and their attendant destruction of friend and foe. 

Peaches will thrive in large containers. They are elegant plants at every stage of life. Pause and observe the peach. Breath deep, position the feet upon the ground, stand tall, gaze upon the beautiful fruit. Allow the river of thoughts to linger on the colorful fragrant fruit, extend attention towards the eternal sky beyond. Remain, quiet, renew. Life is a peach, find the right one for you. 

Leonard Moorehead is a life-long gardener. He practices organic-bio/dynamic gardening techniques in a side lot surrounded by city neighborhoods in Providence RI. His adventures in composting, wood chips, manure, seaweed, hay and enormous amounts of leaves are minor distractions to the joy of cultivating the soil with flowers, herbs, vegetables, berries, and dwarf fruit trees.

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