Each winter gardeners purchase and plant peach trees in North Florida. Regretfully, many of these trees are impulse buys, with little or no thought given to the variety of tree for sale or the requirements to grow peaches.
All too often, ultimate failure results. Peaches are difficult to grow successfully at home.
Choosing the right variety is not as simple as deciding which muscadine or tomato variety to plant.
Peach trees have “internal clocks” called chilling requirements that keep the tree “asleep” during winter. The chilling requirement is recorded as the number of hours below 45 degrees. If a peach tree does not get the correct amount of chilling hours, it will grow poorly and will produce few to no peaches.
Peach breeders have developed peach varieties with various chilling requirements for different parts of the country. Requirements vary from as low as 100 to as high as 1,000 or more hours between peach varieties. It’s important for the backyard fruit enthusiast to match the correct peach variety with the expected chilling-hour range. In general, choose varieties with chilling requirements from 450 to 650 hours in North Florida. During the average winter, Okaloosa County receives 500 to 650 chilling hours.
Chilling hours aren’t the only concern. Peach breeders have also been successful in developing varieties that are resistant to certain diseases, such as bacterial spot. They’ve developed varieties with yellow or white flesh and a succession of varieties that ripen throughout the summer.
It’s best to choose varieties that ripen early in Florida to avoid the rainy season, when diseases are more difficult to control. However, because each variety has a ripening period of about two weeks, some people decide to select two or more later-ripening varieties to extend the harvest season. Growers who do this must be prepared to extend their pest control efforts, too.
Unfortunately, a number of insects and diseases love peaches as much as you and me. Peach breeders are working hard to develop more resistance to these pests. Brown rot, rhizopus rot, scale and bores are just a few of the problems the home gardener interested in peaches must deal with.
Unlike some fruits that tolerate some pests and still produce a fair amount of edible fruits, peaches must be cared for with diligence.
If you’re committed to growing peaches, good luck with your venture. If you’re not committed, I suggest you patronize a local peach producer, produce stand or grocery store and enjoy the fruits of someone else’s labor.
More information on growing peaches in Florida is available from the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences Extension Office in your county or from http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/topic_peaches_and_nectarines.
This article originally appeared on Crestview News Bulletin: Be picky when picking peaches