Peach and Nectarine.

Do peach and Nectarines bear fruits in the Southeast of England. I read from a book that these are mostly all self fertile but I wonder if the are frost resistant and can be planted in the garden.I have never seen any in peoples garden .

Can anyone help please. Thank You in Advance .

 

I've had peach trees for about twenty years now, they crop better some years than others.

Main problem I find is pollenation, although as you say, they are self fertile, but they flower early before many insects are about and when the weather is not always ideal.
A trick someone told me on here is to spray the flowers with water on sunny days, it works.

Peach leaf curl is a problem this year for me and mildew can also be a problem, but mine "peregrine" ripens in early sept, and are best eaten straight off the tree.
Very sweet and juicy in comparison to bought fruit which is picked before ripe.

 

They fruit O.K. so do apricots. But as Pete points out, pollination is dificult. I hand pollinate the lot.
PLC is a major problem.

 

yip, leaf curl got mine too!

 

I've found that when the trees get older, they tend to have little or no PLC. At least, this is the case with our red peach. However, there seems to be more of it this year than usual.

As Pete said, they flower early before many insects are about and due to late frosts this year, we won't have many, if any, fruit this year. So, I'm rationing the bottled and frozen fruits from last years crop now!

.

 

Pete, Cajary, Glen and Kedi,
Thanks so much for your useful information.
Does leaf curl eventually kill the tree or affect the ripening of the fruit?
Thanks in advance.
Letty

 

Leaf curl, as far as I know, doesn't actually kill the tree, but it does take a lot of the trees energy up, trying to replace the fallen distorted leaves, and although the books say there are ways of treating it, personally I've never found them to be much use.
Keeping the plants branches dry over winter seems to be the best approach, but not very practical.

Kedi, my red peach seedlings are very badly affected this year, and basically not growing at all.

 

All we have ever done is to pick the affected leaves off and discard them into the Bio-bin, NOT on the compost heap.

Pete - can you remove the leaves without completely stripping the treelets? How about letting us see a pic of them?

 

Here's one of them


This is on my large trees.

 

That does look bad, Pete, but no worse than ours have looked at times when they were small. I just picked such leaves off the three potted treelets still waiting to go to their new homes this morning. I removed some to the branches too, the ones with too many bad leaves.

The treelet in the first picture is nicely grown and has plenty of leaves, so pick all of the bad ones off and into the garbage can with them.

This first treelet looks like it will turn out like two of the three over at our kids house - not too tall and nice and bushy. We think this looks better than our tall and rather scraggly one. It does make gathering the fruit much easier too.

 

I think they have been hit by at least two problems at once.
Leaf curl and leaf rolling aphids, with a bit of mildew thrown in.

The weather here is just lousy for this kind of growing, last summers legacy is being carried on into yet another soggy summer at the moment.
If things dont improve it may not be worth growing such plants.

I see they have altered "global warming" to "climate change",:D

 

I read an article a few days ago saying that yellow peaches are the the most prone to leaf curl. The last several years, more and more yellow peaches are being planted, so it is then no wonder that the other sorts are being struck by it more often now.