Fragar peach tree in spring
Stone fruit season is here, and I’m feeling just a tad peachy! My love of apples aside, there is something very special about picking a softball sized peach off the tree, biting straight into the sun warmed flesh, and getting such an explosion of juice that it drips off your chin. Makes you feel like a summer loving kid all over again.
Ironically, very few kids in our society have eaten a properly ripe peach. The reality of our food system is that soft-fleshed fruit must be picked before the point of ripeness to withstand the rigours of handling and transportation. As a consequence, stone fruit purchased from the supermarket rarely has enough time on the tree to accumulate real depth of character.
To experience stone fruit at its best, you either need to source fruit directly from a local orchardist, or better still, grow it yourself. Only then can you access the most flavoursome varieties, and pick them at their peak of ripeness. The good news is that stone fruit is among the easiest of all deciduous fruiting trees to grow. With the exception of cherries and European plums, which do best in high chill districts like Stanthorpe and Oakey, peaches, nectarines, Japanese plums and apricots all do very well in Toowoomba and along the ranges. Downs black soil presents an issue for peaches and nectarines, which like good drainage, but it’s good for plums and apricots. Pollination can be an issue for plums and cherries, so it’s a good idea to check the requirements for various species with a good quality nursery.
Birds and possums love stone fruit, but can largely be controlled through netting, however Queensland fruit fly absolutely adores stone fruit. If given half a chance it will decimate your entire crop, so some form of control is vital. On free standing trees, I use a combination of exclusion bags that slip over the ripening fruit, and Eco-Naturalure, a certified organic product that lures and kills both the male and female flies.
If the fruit appears to be “mummified” and is covered in a greyish-brown mould, you’ve got brown rot. This is the most serious of few fungal diseases affecting stone fruit, and can be prevented by binning any diseased fruit and spraying during late winter with either copper hydroxide (preferable to copper oxychloride) or lime sulphur, both of which are approved inputs under the Australian Organic Standard.
Bacterial diseases such as gummosis and silver leaf can be an issue. As always, prevention is easier than the cure, so do most pruning during the warmer months so that wounds heal quickly, and always sterilise your tools. I simply carry around a spray bottle containing metho, and give my tools a spray between every tree. This ensures that disease isn’t spread from one tree to another.
I often get asked about pruning, and my answer is that it can be a simple or elaborate as you like. Unpruned trees left to their own devices will flower and fruit just fine, but to maximise the health of the tree and the quality of your crop it’s a good idea to do some shaping. In the first couple of seasons concentrate on creating a framework of branches. The open vase (or goblet) shape is still a good basic structure for a stone fruit tree, but in the longer term, pruning depends on a knowledge of how various trees produce fruiting buds – you don’t want to be cutting off potential fruiting wood!
As a general rule, cherries and European plums form spurs on two-year old wood, Japanese plums and apricots fruit on a combination of spurs and new growth, while peaches and nectarines fruit solely on new wood that grew in the previous summer. Without overcomplicating things too much, peaches and nectarines benefit from an annual prune in late summer to remove about a third of the existing growth, which will allow new fruiting wood to form in time for the following spring. For more detailed info, a book I highly recommend is Pruning and Training,by Christopher Brickell and David Joyce. Louis Glowinski’s Complete Book of Fruit Growing in Australia is also excellent.
In my view, there’s absolutely no need to sacrifice flavour on the altar of convenience. The best tasting peach I’ve ever had wasn’t purchased from a shop. It was from a ‘Fragar’ tree growing in my garden and I’ll remember the fragrance and taste until the day I die. I’m hopelessly biased, but my advice is simply to grow your own food, for the sake of yourself, your family, and the planet.
First published in the Toowoomba Chronicle 26th November 2011. Photo by Justin Russell.
Don’t forget to visit our new site The Radish, edible gardening from roots to fruits!!
