Tips to easily grow your own fresh delicious peaches and nectarines

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Peach and nectarine trees thrive in the dry Okanagan Valley, but on the West Coast, with the persistent spring rain, they can be a bit of a challenge. However, with the right location and a few tips on pruning, we can easily grow our own fresh delicious peaches and nectarines.

To be successful, peaches need to be espaliered or fanned out against a hot, dry, west- or south-facing wall of a house or garage, preferably one with a good overhang to keep much of the spring rain off the foliage. With this protection, they will dry quickly even after a spring shower. A wooden fence, situated in a sunny spot and with a clear poly canopy overtop to keep those leaves dry, can also work. And then there are the folks who grow peaches and nectarines in their greenhouses, which is a pruning issue, but well worth the effort because they get to enjoy the fruit one month earlier.

Fruiting peaches (Prunus persica) are self-fertile, and one tree is all you need to get plenty of fruit. Many new varieties of nectarines (Prunus persica nucipersica) are also self-fertile, and one tree will suffice. If you have room for two trees, peaches and nectarines cross-pollinate nicely.

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There is a series of genetic dwarf peaches that are very compact, growing only about six-feet tall and wide, but currently in B.C. there’s a significant shortage due to budding issues. They’re beautiful plants, but in coastal areas I find they produce fruit very late, often not until the end of August, and the fruit isn’t quite the same as those huge, luscious ones we find at summer fruit stands.

There isn’t much dwarfing rootstock on our regular fruit peaches, which are usually grafted onto plum root stalks, but, with proper pruning they can be kept in the range of eight-to-12 feet both high and wide. Hard-pruning is necessary with peaches and nectarines, both for production and size maintenance. Recently, I spoke with Doug Neufeld, who along with his bother Dave, are two of B.C.’s outstanding growers and graft specialists. They’re exceptionally knowledgeable about coastal and Interior fruit-growing.

I asked Neufeld if there was any danger to foundations when growing peaches next to a house or other structure. He said since they’re generally grafted onto plum rootstock, which is relatively weak, they shouldn’t cause any problems.

He also said it’s important to remember that peach and nectarine trees bear fruit on last year’s growth. To keep the trees both productive and compact, choose pencil-sized wood or slightly larger and cut it back hard to at least half of its growth. By pruning at this time of year, you can also see the buds to know how much fruit you will get. This is also true of freshly planted trees. Any little twigs from last year, even though they may have a bud or two, are just too small and should be removed.

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The biggest challenge he mentioned is encouraging folks to cut back the vigorous growth from last year, even those branches up to one inch in diameter. These trees are very robust, and if you let them continue to grow, they can quickly grow six-to-eight feet in one season, making your tree way too large. By hard-pruning that vigorous growth, even during the growing season, all kinds of new shoots will appear with the potential to produce flower buds.

This is especially true for existing trees that have simply become too big. A severe pruning now can bring an oversized tree back down to a comfortable level, and many new shoots will develop this year that will produce lots of fruit next summer.

Training of espaliered trees is a key factor in fruit production. It’s always important to cut away growth that protrudes outward from the wall and into the wet weather. Sometimes you can carefully bend and secure these wayward branches sideways, so they fit more closely to the wall. As with most fruit trees, horizontal branching tends to be more productive than vertical growth. With proper training, you can fill your backdrop wall with a series of well-spaced branches for significant fruit production year-after-year.

Even though you may be doing a great espalier job, extremely wet springs can cause the development of peach leaf curl fungus. Infected leaves curl, and often gummosis, a wet, solid sap, will appear on the stems. It can cause the aborting of some buds and blooms, but with the return of sunnier, drier weather, the tree will recover. An application of copper spray in November, just after the leaves have fallen, and again in mid-winter, will help prevent, or at least minimize, this problem.

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As for the best varieties to grow, Neufeld said that virtually all varieties will do well when kept out of the rain. The available heat units in any particular area will determine the ripening times. Here on the coast, even early varieties may be a week or two behind the Okanagan, but they will provide a tasty late-summer harvest.

The ‘Frost’ peach is one of today’s most popular freestone varieties because of its good size, rich flavour and its peach-leaf-curl resistance. ‘Redhaven’, also a freestone peach, is, perhaps, the best and most well-known older variety. It has a long ripening season, which is ideal for the home garden. ‘Early Redhaven’ can ripen up to two weeks earlier, but it is a semi-freestone peach. ‘Reliance’, one of the hardiest varieties (Zone 4), is a very flavourful freestone peach that fruits at the same time as ‘Redhaven’. Great tasting ‘Veteran’ is an early, slightly smaller freestone that has much less peach fuzz.

‘Galaxy’ and ‘Saturn’, two novel, doughnut-shaped peaches, are both freestones that have white flesh.

‘Fantasia’ is a large freestone nectarine with red-and-yellow colouring and good flavour. ‘Flavortop’, another large, tasty, freestone nectarine, is mostly red. A newer variety, ‘Hardired’ has red skin with a golden blush, excellent flavour and is well-suited to the southwest.

Many garden stores are now receiving fresh stocks of bare-root fruit trees. If you can find a location in your garden that has lots of sun and a suitable empty wall on which to espalier a peach or nectarine, this is the time to plant one so you can enjoy amazing peaches and nectarines for many years.