Doughnut Peach
2001: This one blossomed like an ornamental. Beautiful!
The fruit was small (but lots of them), and very tasty. We
learned that we must pinch off some of the excess fruit early
on by the time they reach the diameter of a penny in size.
We used metallic streamers to keep the birds away after
they first got 3 of our peaches. The peaches are sweet even
before they're properly ripe.
2002: New growth was on the order of 2 feet on some branches. Blossoms were again outstanding. Fruit was more plentiful and larger than previous year. Used metallic streamers and netting to keep birds away. Fruit is sweet as honey. First harvest was July 3, but many more still unripe on the tree. Weekend of July 14 we picked 70-80 fruits, in part to rescue them from the ants. Have noticed several fruits with worms. The last dozen or so fruits are still on the tree as of July 20.
2003: The tree had an extended growing season this year, so many new-growth branches are over a foot long. Peaches are now about the size of a half-dollar, but there aren't as many as last year, and yesterday the wind blew a lot of them down. I haven't had to do much thinning of the fruit this year. 6/22/03: Still nothing ripe, but expecting the first harvest to be around July 10. Looks like many peaches will be as large as what we find in the supermarket. 6/28/03: Picked our first peaches. They're not quite ripe, but these peaches seem best (to us) when the flesh is still firm, so we prefer them just before they are truly ripe. 7/10/03: We have some very large doughnuts this year. Taste is very good, but we still like to get them just before the skin turns very yellow. Caterpillars will do some damage to fully ripe peaches. We had tremendous branch and leaf growth after the peaches started, so they're well hidden this year, and it's almost like a treasure hunt to try and find them. The last peaches were picked around 7/25.
2005: 2/27/05: The tree began to blossom on about 2/19/05, and today is nearly in full bloom. Once again we expect a big crop. 3/24/05: Lots of tiny fruits appeared over the last week, so we should have quite a satisfactory crop. 4/21/05: The tree has had a small problem with leaf curl, so we're keeping extra close watch on it. The crop is small, as most of the small fruits were stillborn. We will have a decent crop, but nothing like last year. The largest fruits right now are a bit less in diameter than a half dollar, with quarter-size fruits being plentiful. 5/30/05: We continue to thin the peaches gradually. Leaf curl continues to be a minor problem, but every time I see a few leaves start to curl I just pinch off the entire shoot that has the problem leaves. Peaches are now approaching the size that they were when they ripened during the first year that we had a crop. But we're still weeks away from the first fruits of this season. 6/10/05: The peaches are beginning to get large. I think we'll have quite a good crop, if the worms don't get in first, and if the sun decides to finally come out. 6/12/05: We have some very large specimens on the tree, and many peaches look ripe, though I'm sure that they have more to go. I fully expect to harvest the first peaches within 2 weeks. 6/19/05: Within the last several days we have thrown away 20-25 peaches that rotted on the tree. We have eaten one or two peaches so far, and they were OK. They may do well in spite of the lack of sun, provided they don't get moldy first. 6/26/05: We continue to throw about 10 peaches per day due to mold, and another 5 or so due to worms. But the tree is very fragrant, so I think that we will soon have an avalanche of fruit. A few warm days of 80 degrees might be sufficient. However, the fruits are gaining size fairly rapidly, so I am concerned that there may be some branch breakage due to the weight of the peaches. The tree as a whole has grown out and up, like it wants to take over the world. 7/10/05: Yesterday we cleaned out the tree. Whatever was spoiled we threw away, and everything else we picked. This resulted in a number of fruits being picked before their time. We probably lost close to 150 lbs. of fruit due to spoilage this year, which is really tragic as doughnut peaches fetch $6 per lb in the store. These doughnut peaches are excellent in a cobbler or pie. We canned some, which was very hard because you need to peel a lot of peaches to fill a quart jar. 9/6/05: We heavily pruned the tree 3 days ago.
2006: 2/26/06: The first blossoms will open this week. Unless we get another cold spell I think this tree will have a good year. I only wish that I had pruned it back harder, as there are too many small, high branches. 2/28/06: The first several blossoms opened. 4/13/06: The tree reached and passed full bloom, perhaps 2 weeks ago. Now there are lots of tiny peaches on the branches. I observed a little leaf curl two days ago, and much more yesterday. The only solution I know of is to watch carefully and pluck the leaves as soon as I see them. 4/29/06: I've been plucking infected leaves every day for two weeks. I also learned that I have brown rot, which can be treated with Daconil. This may be what contributed to the mold that destroyed 3/4 of my crop last year. If I spray 1-4 weeks prior to harvest this may prevent the wastage. 5/19/06: I have thinned all of the peaches that I need to. Leaf curl continues, but at a very slow pace. The leaves and branches are coming out very rapidly and covering the small fruits. Most of the late blossoms didn't even form small fruits, and many currently small fruits will likely be dropped as the tree focuses its efforts on the earlier fruits. 5/30/06: I continue to see leaf curl, at about one leaf per day. The tree has grown like wild since the fruit set, so now all the fruit is well-hidden. I applied Diazinon yesterday to control worms (codling moth). Most fruits that haven't reached the diameter of a husked walnut seem to shrivel and fall off. The largest fruits are about the diameter of an old silver dollar. 6/21/06: The crop seems OK this year, but some of the fruits are true doughnuts: due to growing conditions they cracked on the bottom, and you can see clear through them. We won't have anything ripe soon, so this looks more like the 2003 conditions. Hopefully we'll get some more size to the fruit before they ripen. The new leaves and branches have grown almost out of control and the tree looks impressive. Most of the fruit is hidden by leaves. 7/4/06: We're beginning to get ripe fruit, and the taste is at least satisfactory. However, I've already thrown about 10 moldy fruits, while we've picked only 5 or 6. If we get some good sunshine over the next few days we might be able to can peaches this weekend. The peaches are quite large, and the crop looks bigger now that most of the fruit is yellow/red in color. 7/19/06: We had a possum raid the tree for 5 consecutive nights beginning two weeks ago. We netted the tree, but it still got inside somehow. We finally captured it after staying up until 1:30 trying to catch it. It destroyed about a dozen peaches every night that it came. We have been picking peaches rapid fire since about a week ago. The largest was about 1/3 lb. Worms got some of the crop. Mold got some more (but not nearly as much as last year). The peaches are good, we canned some last weekend, but we have more than we know what to do with, in spite of the fact that I thinned heavily earlier in the year. We should trim the tree back hard this winter. I've been able to climb the tree in order to pick some of the peaches, though I can't go very far. 7/22/06: We picked the last bunch on 7/20/06, but found a couple stragglers as late as this morning.
2008: 3/13/08: The tree is in full bloom now. The blossoms are very dense like last year, but we pruned more heavily this January than last, so the branches aren't as dense, and the tree's beauty is less impressive than last year. I've noticed very few bees this year, so I wonder if the crop will be thinner as a result of poor pollination? 3/23/08: The ground near this tree is carpeted with beautiful petals. Crop volume and quality still depend on too many factors to make any predictions. 4/13/08: The blossom jackets are still hanging onto the fruits. I'm keeping an eye out for jacket rot, though I've never seen it, so I can only go by what I've heard. I can tell already that we're going to be sick and tired of thinning long before we get finished. So far I have seen no leaf curl, so this is a good sign. 5/4/08: I've spent hours thinning these peaches, and it's obvious that I'll be thinning until the harvest. Ladybugs are all over this tree, so they're controlling the other pests. 6/7/08: I continue to thin the peaches. We staked up several branches because the crop is (already!) so heavy that the branches could break at any time. The largest fruits are larger than old-style silver dollars. The cool month of May has slowed down the growing and ripening process. May saw two 100-degree days, but the remainder of the month had very few days over 80 degrees. This is the coolest May that I've seen since we moved here. 6/22/08: Thanks to the recent heat wave (108 degrees!) these peaches are gaining both color and size. Yesterday I saw a very strange thing: a black ladybug! It had two orange spots (slightly larger than a normal ladybug's black spots) near the front of its body, but the rest was completely black. The birds are taste-testing the fruit now. I found, for the second time in ten days, a worm-damaged fruit. I've never seen them infest fruit that is so green, so either the worms came early this year and we'll do OK, or we're in for a season with a lot of pest damage. Perhaps I should have sprayed, but I didn't want to kill the ladybugs. 7/3/07: We've begun picking an occasional ripe peach. So far, however, we've had more moldy peaches than really ripe ones. I found 4 moldy ones a few days ago, and another two today. The fruit is very fragrant by now, which leads one to believe that many peaches are ripe, but only a few are appropriately ripe to eat. 7/5/08: This is maddening, walking by the tree ans smelling all those peaches but then finding very few that are actually ripe. 7/21/08: We still have 5-10 lbs of fruit left on the tree, but they're all tiny, and we'll leave them for the birds. 7/26/08: Picked the last of the peaches yesterday, 5 lbs. worth, bringing this year's total to 250 lbs., which doesn't include about 40 lbs. lost to spoilage and hungry critters. To our pleasant surprise, worms were not much of a problem this year. The heaviest part of the harvest was 7/11 to 7/19, during which we averaged 21 lbs. of fruit per day. On 7/16 alone we gathered 48 lbs.
2009: 3/1/09: First blossoms opened today. Unfortunately, the person who did the pruning decided to cut back most of the intermediate-sized branches, leaving the small ones as if this were a plum tree. With the volume of fruit we ordinarily get, the small branches won't be able to hold it, so we'll either get broken branches or we'll need to do a great deal of thinning. 3/26/09: The high winds blew most of the blossoms off the tree. This is the first year that I failed to take photographs of the tree. 4/23/09: New growth has begun, and I started thinning the peaches already. About 12 days ago I observed extensive leaf curl, though after plucking the offending leaves there has been little recurrence of the problem. I think that I'll spray this tree myself next year, as I know that every bud must be wet by the lime sulfur or copper sulfate spray. No one else will be as diligent about this as I will. Observed yesterday that a small area of the tree was infested with aphids, so sprayed the area, as lady bugs are unavailable. 6/11/09: I encountered four separate leaves with leaf curl about 10 days ago. I plucked each leaf, and have seen no instances of leaf curl since. However, due to the continuing cool weather I've seen several very immature fruits consumed by mold. I think that the aborted tiny fruits that don't fall off are a contributor to the mold, so I've been diligent about removing all such old residue, and about cutting and removing the dead twigs. 6/28/09: Found another instance of leaf curl yesterday, and a couple of moldy peaches. All of those little peaches that mummify on the tree end up causing the branch they're on to simply shrivel and die. Most of the peaches now are over two inches in diameter, with some at three inches or more. Many have a deep red blush, and some have that attractive almost-ripe scent.
2010: 1/14/10: We spent a couple of hours pruning this tree in late December, but when we stepped back it looked like nothing had been pruned. While we were pruning I found a couple of peaches that had been left on the tree from last year, molded of course. We applied copper sulfate and Volck oil in early January. Next treatment is in early February. I might do well to apply some Neem Oil with fungicide, especially since the mold on the "leftover" peaches may be the same type of mold that wreaks havoc with the nearly-ripe peaches later in the season. 6/12/10: I've been thinning these peaches aggressively for weeks. Also, due to a long period of moist weather I've seen continuous leaf curl over a period of many months. And it wasn't just the typical red color, either. It was sometimes brown, gray, or green. I spent quite a bit of time inspecting the tree, climbing the tree, etc. in order to make sure that I plucked as many infected leaves as possible. The peaches are now larger than silver dollar size, but I've seen a handful just rot on the tree, not from mold, but just brown rot. Not sure what's going on. 6/30/10: 1.5 lbs. 7/7/10: 1.0 lbs. 7/10/10: 9.0 lbs. 7/11/10: 3.5 7/14/10: 15.0 7/17/10: 46 Total: 76.0 lbs.
2011: 3/14/11: First blossoms opened up around Feb. 13. Tree is currently in full bloom, though I noted a number of unopened blossoms yesterday. 6/25/11: We've had a terrible year for leaf curl, as during the last couple of days I noticed about half a dozen peaches with brown rot. Everything described in this link has happened to my tree: Brown Rot info Between thinning and cutting back diseased branches we don't have many peaches this year, but they will likely be well above average size.
2011: 7/4/11: 3.0 lbs. 7/8/11: 31.0 7/9/11: 8.0 7/11/11: 16.0 7/13/11: 2.5 7/16/11: 22.5 Total: 83.0 lbs. 2007 and 2008 had 240+ lbs. of fruit each year, and now we're down to 75-85 per year. This is so sad.
2012: 2/24/12: I noticed the first blossoms today, though they may have been open yesterday. I only sprayed this tree 3 times this season, once with LiquiCop around mid-January, and again with Neem oil at the end of January and on 2/18/12. I was uncomfortable with the Neem oil application so close to flowering, but didn't have much choice. I also applied the copper spray and Neem oil to the other stone-fruits on the dates indicated. We cut this tree way back last year, but I think we could have cut more. I'm mostly worried about the brown rot, but leaf curl is also a concern. 6/1/12: We have had the worst case of peach leaf curl this year that we have ever had. I'd find as many diseased leaves in a day as I have found during many entire seasons, and I did this for weeks at a time. Within the last couple of days we've found evidence of a raider, eating/destroying 5-10 very small unripe peaches every day. We suspect a squirrel. The largest peaches today are about the diameter of a silver dollar, while most peaches are between half dollar and silver dollar size. This size is roughly consistent with past years. I have aggressively thinned the peaches, now our raider is thinning them for me. I need to apply Spectracide soon to reduce risk of brown rot. Maybe that will also make the tree less desirable to the raider. 6/7/12: Applied Spectracide Immunox on 6/3/12. Need to apply again on 6/17/12. Our raider turns out to be a squirrel. Trying to trap him, but so far no luck.