Yes it’s a freestone. I like peach cobbler and freestone is the only way to go! It says they’ll get about 5 feet max. I have a dwarf nectarine also.
I'm going to have to look that one up and see if it's available locally. I miss having fresh peaches, and so do the local squirrels and rats.
Not questioning your horticultural capabilities but how old were the trees? How did you prune them? How did you fertilize?
LOL...question away Baked! They were planted as whips and not allowed to fruit for the first two years. After that they were painstakingly pruned every winter (to open up the branches and promote new growth) and thinned in spring to no more than one flower every 8". Squirrels were trapped using peanut butter on bread and relocated 7+miles away.
I didn't fertilize them as I recall, but over time there were spots on the bark that would ooze sap from wounds that I assumed were from some sort of insect. I never treated them for that as I recall that it would have involved systemic pesticide that I wasn't willing to use (and still won't given the number of fruit trees sharing my yard). I decided I would get fruit from them for as long as I could, and then cut them down when they died. I'd say they lived about 10 years or so, and I eventually cut them down.
In the dirt I currently have 2 pomegranate trees, a satsuma tree, and 3 lemon trees all grown from seed. I also have 3 other lemon trees in huge pots and 2 more in smaller pots. All my lemon trees are offspring of a lemon tree growing behind my first apartment in Los Angeles that had sprouted seeds in its lemons. That would have been in 1988.
I have roughly 16 fruit trees. Most are stone fruit varieties. I also have some dwarf and super dwarf varieties. I have a super dwarf peach that is in a 5 gallon that gave me a couple dozen full sized fruit last year. That was after thinning it out!
Excellent return on a 5 gallon pot!
If you’ve never tried a Jamaican cherry it’s very interesting. It taste like captain crunch berries with a Jelly Belly’s buttered popcorn finish, lol.
I was going to ask if it required freezing in winter as many cherries do, but then you said this:
It is VERY cold sensitive
So I'm guessing the answer is "no"!
But there are major differences in HOW plants uptake nutrients between LOS and fertilizer based grows,
for taking the time to pull that all together Celt! I was going to try to respond to some of this individually, but instead I'd like to post this quote and have folks interested read the rest article on osmotic pressure and fertilizers:
"Regulating the Nutrient Level Around Plants
One of the challenges for us as gardeners is to regulate the nutrient level around our plants. Plants can cope with considerable variation in the level of nutrients around the roots, but they do better if the level is more stable. That's why the comment is made that it is better to fertilize more often with very weak fertilizer than it is to use stronger fertilizer occasionally.
Let's look a bit at ways in which nutrient levels can be stabilized around plants. The key here is that nutrients are available to plants and affect the osmotic pressure only if they are in solution. Nutrients not in solution are completely inert as far as the plant is concerned. You know, what would be really nice would be to have some mechanism which stored nutrients in the soil in an insoluble form and slowly converted them to a soluble form at a rate which keeps a constant level around the plant. You often hear comments that organic fertilizers - compost, manures, etc. - are far better than chemical fertilizers. Environmentalists and "greenies" often wax so lyrical it seems as though the nutrients from organic fertilizers are good and healthy while the nutrients in chemical fertilizers are evil and poisonous. That of course is utter rubbish; a potassium ion is a potassium ion whatever the source. Organic fertilizers do, however, have a major advantage. The nutrients in chemical fertilizers are in a readily soluble form. Very shortly after the fertilizer is applied to the soil, the nutrients dissolve, raising the nutrient level and osmotic pressure. The nutrients in organic fertilizers, however, are often locked up in complex organic compounds and do not dissolve readily. When they are applied to the soil it requires the action of microbes in the soil to break down these organic compounds and thereby release the nutrients to dissolve in the soil water. Thus organic fertilizers provide a slow steady nutrient release." [Bold mine, obviously!]
The
source is posted by Virginia Tech from an article from our friends down in Australia. It's an interesting read, and they go on to recommend Osmocote as a way to mimic the slow release of nutrients similar to an organic grow! I do that when I hand off clones to folks not interested in doing anything but watering.
And the basic takeaway is that the advantage to organic grows is not the nutrients themselves, but how evenly the plants can use nutrients from organic soil. It puts the roots in a more balanced state of osmotic pressure compared to synthetic nutrients. But so will watering more often with diluted synthetic nutes (another reason to use fast-draining substrates).
Whether organic soils create more terpenes/cannabinoids is something only a lab can tell us over the course of an actual scientific study.
If you have the interest, time, and space to grow in LOS, great! For those who don't/can't, that's fine too. Find what works for you and grow the best plants you can.