Latest High-Yield and High-Quality Management Techniques for Peach Trees
As one of the most common fruits, peaches now come in more and more varieties, but there is a fairly common problem at present. Peaches are grown for the market, so the earlier a variety ripens, the greater its advantage in capturing the market, but the fruit grown this way is not quite ideal. So how can you make it high-yielding and high-quality?
1. Flower bud handling
The flower bud stage is the season when peach trees need the most nutrients. Generally, a peach tree will be covered in densely packed flower buds, and our first step should begin with handling the flower buds. The benefit of doing this is to grow more high-quality branches and flower buds, mainly by removing the weaker flower buds so that nutrients can be supplied in a concentrated way, and this should stop before flowering begins. To ensure a sufficient base for later selection, you do not need to deliberately remove many flower buds at the earlier stage; you can keep observing.
2. Flower handling
After flowering begins, a second round of handling is needed. At this time the flowers are all competing with each other for nutrients. Although some weaker flowers cannot compete with the high-quality flowers, they still consume a lot of nutrients. To ensure the fruit set rate of these flowers, a batch must be specifically removed. At this time, more can be kept on strong branches, while fewer should be kept on thin branches. If the flowers are all growing well, you can consider keeping them all.
3. Young fruit handling
After fruit set comes the final round of handling. Many growers often overlook this point, but in fact this is the most important time. By this stage, a peach tree mostly cannot ensure that all its fruit will mature, so fruit will drop one after another during this period. If growers want a high yield of high-quality fruit, then it is best to promptly clean up some unnecessary fruit. Fruit with pests or diseases, and small, densely clustered fruit, are basically the priority targets for removal. This is equivalent to concentrating the energy of these waste fruits into the high-quality fruits, so the nutrient supply will be much more sufficient. In addition, the remaining fruits are already relatively high-quality, so naturally they will be large in size and high in quality.
4. Branch handling
In fact, cleaning up branches is also a very important part. The nutrients required by one extra branch are far more than those required by an ordinary fruit, so these branches are also targets for removal. The first type of branch to remove is dead or diseased branches; the second type is non-fruiting branches; the third type is fruit-thinning branches, that is, a branch with extremely good growth that does not bear much fruit for a long time. These all waste nutrients and should be removed. After cleaning up, new branches will naturally grow for you to select from.
The nutrients of a fruit tree usually cannot supply enough for too many fruits to mature; it has a fruiting bottleneck. So why not remove those inferior fruits and let better fruits take their place, so as to achieve the goal of high yield? The quality of such fruit will also be much better.