Peaches and Nectarines
(Prunus persica)
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Peach and Nectarine Cultivars
First off, let's clear away any confusion between "peaches" and "nectarines". A nectarine is just a fuzzless peach. The end. Wasn't that easy? ("Though
grocers treat fuzzy peaches and nectarines as different fruits, they belong to the same species.")
To us, these are for maybe a little fresh eating, but mostly pies and other baked confections. Peaches being self-fruitful, those not needing a very great lot of them can do
with a single tree.
Peach types divide in a couple of ways: yellow vs. white and clingstone vs. freestone. One source says that "Peaches with white flesh typically are very sweet with
little acidity, while yellow-fleshed peaches typically have an acidic tang coupled with sweetness, though this [varies greatly]. . . . Europeans and North Americans
have historically favoured the acidic, yellow-fleshed kinds." Take it for what it's worth.
As to the stoning "habit": in "clingstone" peach types, the flesh literally "clings" to the stone, and has to be cut away with a knife (or one's teeth); in "freestone" types, the stone
easily separates from the flesh. Older peach types are clingstones, but nowadays such types are used almost exclusively for processing rather than dessert use, owing to the annoyance that
clinging can be. There seems to be no noticeable difference in flavor or eating quality (other than mechanics) between the types.
In the cold-winter/dry-summer climate we have, peach-leaf curl, the commonest major peach-tree disease, is rare, so disease resistance is not, for us, a major consideration in cultivar
selection, a pleasant change. We do, though, need to be sure we select a type that is cold-hardy down to--to be safe--Zone 5 or, better, Zone 4. (It's not just sheer hardiness: peaches
require a certain amount of winter chill, and if one chooses a low-chill type in error, the tree will receive its needed chill requirement by perhaps February or even January and will try
to start blooming then, which is fatal; unless you live in a rather warm climate, beware "low-chill" varieties and seek high-chilling-hours types.)
Looking around, we ran into the Flamin' Fury® line of peaches (and at least one nectarine),
developed by Paul Friday; these have received excellent reviews from third parties and are now carried by many of the most respected nurseries (Friday was twice president of the National
Peach Council). We say all that because the claims for these peaches may, at first, seem hyperbolic; but the credentials are certainly there. Friday works in Michigan, so we can be
pretty well assured that his line will do well in our sort of area, though it still behooves one to choose carefully from his two dozen or so types. (Unless you are a commercial grower,
you would buy his trees through one of the many retail nurseries carrying them, all listed on his site as linked above.)
Outside that line, there are a few other contenders, the likeliest we saw actually being named Contender (hardy to Zone 4), a yellow freestone peach that
requires something over a thousand chilling hours (1,050, to be exact). Because it blooms quite late, its blooms tend to escape late spring freezes. It is said that "This is a very
attractive yellow-flesh variety with good size (2.5 to 3.0 inches in diameter). Seventy-five to ninety percent of the surface is colored red. The flesh is light yellow and aromatic, and
flavor is very good. The fruit is fairly round and the suture is slightly raised and soft. Fruit ripen uniformly. This variety produces many flower buds (thinning may be required),
crops well most years, and is moderately resistant to bacterial spot." (North Carolina Cooperative Extension). Contender was found by another source (Mississippi State University) to be
the most productive of seven nominally "frost-hardy" types they tried. It reportedly keeps well for a peach.
We really like the look of the Flamin' Fury® line, but simply owing to ordering convenience (keeping the number of suppliers down), we went with the Contender
peach. Ceterus paribus, as the economists put it, we'd have been very interested in the Flamin'
Fury® PF-11 nectarine, and recommend you take a good look at it (be sure to read about the PF-11 Nectarine, not the PF-11 Peach).
Growing Peach Trees
Rather than re-invent the wheel, we here refer you the peach-growing pages of the links list farther below.
More
Relevant Links
Besides any links presented above on this page, the following ought to be especially helpful:
(And don't forget that we have listings of nurseries on our suppliers page.)
Odds and Ends
Biology
The peach is a small deciduous tree of the subfamily Prunoideae of the amazingly utile family Rosaceae. It is classified, with the almond, in the subgenus
Amygdalus within the genus Prunus, distinguished from the other subgenera by its corrugated seed shell.
The leaves are lanceolate. Flowers are produced in early spring, prior to the leaves; they may be solitary or paired, and are pink with five petals. The fruit is a "drupe" (a stone
fruit), with a single large seed encased in a reddish oval hardwood stone ("pit"); they have yellow or whitish flesh, a delicate aroma, and a velvety skin that bruises easily.
History
Peaches come to us from China, where they are a classic foodstuff, their cultivation being recorded at least as early as the 10th century B.C. Naturally, the Chinese, devoted to the
fruit, developed a veritable myriad of cultivars.
Our modern word "peach" harks back to about 300 B.C., when the Greek philosopher Theophrastus--wrongly believing the fruit to have originated in Persia--named it after that region. His
confusion likely arose from the common importing of peaches from Persia (also mentioned in Roman records). The peach is believed to have reached continental Europe at around the timne of
the birth of Christ, though they do not seem to appear in England till about 1650.
Curiously, the fuzzless nectarine type does not appear in any peach citations from anywhere in the B.C. eras; they are not mentioned till 1720, in the then-new American colonies, where
they are grown along with standard peaches in Virginia. The famed peach researcher A. J. Downing has recorded 19 nectarine races as extant in America in 1857.
Envoi
Never plant a peach or nectarine anywhere near an almond tree. The two--cloesly related--would likely cross-pollinate, yielding very bitter almonds.
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