My Peach Tree Bears Fruit

Back in the mid to late 90's, I decided it would be a good thing to plant a mini orchard in the front of my house. I did some reading, a bit of measuring and figured out what would fit in. I opted for dwarf and semi-dwarf plants and ordered a couple of varieties of apples, a peach, a 5 in 1 pear tree, and a few blueberries from some mail order nurseries and set them out.

I live very near the boundary of the Oak Mountain State Park and my property might as well be declared a zoo. There are raccoons, possums, foxes, coyotes, squirrels, rabbits, armadillos, and deer constantly tracking through my yard. All of the aforementioned animals were no problem to my little orchard except for the deer. Deer are browsers. If you have ever watched them eat, they walk along and get a bite of this and a bite of that. They spend as much time eating leaves off trees as they do nibbling grass. They seemed to relish my orchard. It was their own little smorgasbord. The apple trees didn't make it but about two years before they died. The 5 in 1 pear did great until it got up about 8 feet tall, then I came home from work one day and the deer had pulled it down from the top and broke it off at one of the main grafts. It has come back out forked, one side has pears and the other side, which I suppose sprang up from the root stock, has what looks like big chinaberries. Due to neglect and birds, the blueberries never have done much. That leaves the sad little peach tree.

It sits up closest to my drive. For as long as I can remember, it has been between 3 and 5 feet tall. Everytime it would put on new leaves, the deer would come through and strip it. They not only ate the leaves but also the young shoots. In the last couple of years, something has happened. For reasons unknown to me the deer have left the little peach tree alone. I suppose that all those years it was being pruned from the top allowed it to develop a big root system because it has really taken off. This year it is up around 10 feet tall. A week or so ago I went out to get in the truck and I noticed that it had some small peaches on it. They were about one and a half inches, which is kinda small for peaches. One of them was actually starting to turn a reddish hue. I was in a hurry and did not take the time to examine them closely. Yesterday I was outside getting ready to go somewhere and Dixie had walked over to the edge of the yard. I walked down to get her to come back and when I got up close to the peach tree I noticed that the reddish hue was now a purple hue. I walked over, felt of the one that I could reach and it did not have any fuzz. It is not a peach at all, but a plum. I've waited 15 years on my peach tree and all the time it was a plum tree.

Now some folks might be really pissed off to wait 15 years on peaches and get plums but I am sort of a glass half full kind of guy and am just happy to have the plums. A storm did come through last night and knocked 3 of the 5 plums off but I retrieved them this morning and set them on the counter in the kitchen to finish ripening. Life is good.