Once you have tasted the freshly-grown fruit from your backyard peach tree, fruit purchased from a grocery store will never hold the same appeal. Growing your own peaches is rewarding and healthy, as you know exactly which if any spray treatments have been used on the tree and its fruit. But, it is important to take necessary steps to keep your fruit tree healthy and productive, so here are two tips to help you accomplish this.
Trim and Prune Your Tree
During the summer growing season, your peach tree will grow many new branches. If these are not trimmed away each year, they will cause your tree to grow thick and full, which results in a lessening of your tree's fruit production. For your tree's peaches to mature and ripen, they need access to direct sunlight, so you will need to trim these extra branches from your tree.
To give your tree access to the most direct sunlight, it is recommended that you remove branches from the top and middle sections of the tree. This will give your tree a vase shape. Trimming and pruning your tree's branches in this manner opens up the center of the tree to more sunlight to help ripen more of its fruit.
The best time of year to trim your tree's excess branches is in early spring, before the leaves have emerged on your tree. This will help you to more easily see the shape of your tree to trim it into its vase shape. Be sure to trim and prune excess branches when the tree's blossoms are beginning to swell and have their pink color just starting to show.
Prevent and Treat Tree Borer
Peach-tree borer can weaken and kill your backyard peach tree, so it is important to be aware of this threat to protect your tree. A peach-borer larvae begins its life after the eggs from a borer moth are laid at the base of your peach tree's trunk and hatch in the middle and late part of summer. The larvae eat their way under the bark of your tree's trunk and into the center of the trunk, where they tunnel out holes and eat the pulp inside the trunk, damaging its vascular system. The borer larvae also allows plant pathogens to get inside and further weaken your tree.
Prevention of tree borer should be your main goal, and there are several ways you can keep peach-borer moths from laying their eggs on your tree trunk's base. One method to repel the moth is to plant garlic bulbs around the base of your peach tree. The smell from the garlic bulb makes the moth avoid that area for laying. You can also spread cedar-bark wood chips around the base of your peach tree, as the odor also repels the moth. Spraying a citrus extract around the base of your peach tree's trunk is another method to repel the moth with odor.
It is best to prevent a peach borer from getting inside your tree and causing damage, but if you find evidence of borer larvae around the base of your tree, you can treat the larvae and prevent further infestations with organic neem-oil extract. Neem oil neutralizes any moth eggs that have been laid around your tree's trunk. Then, the odor of the oil stops any more moths from laying eggs around the base of your tree's trunk. If there are any larvae in your peach tree, neem oil will penetrate into the bark and stop the growth of the larvae, preventing them from doing further damage.
Treat your tree with neem oil twice a month, starting in late spring until September, reapplying the oil after it rains. Apply a highly concentrated amount around the crown, or base, of the tree, into the soil and twelve inches up the trunk. Be sure to saturate all the areas of the tree and soil to treat it fully.
After you have treated a borer infestation, it is recommended that you trim off any infected areas in late winter, before your peach tree begins to have new growth. Be sure to burn any infected branch trimmings to prevent the larvae emerging and re-infesting your tree again in the spring.
Use this information to help keep your peach tree healthy and productive.
