With my limited info on peach trees I would say the less is better. Dont over water, peaches dont like "wet feet". Keep an eye for pests and disease and spray if you must. For disease, usually when you see it its too late. You usually have to spray during early spring before shuck split and preferably when the buds are first swollen to control most disease. In moist/cold areas, more spraying might be necessary, I dont know. As for pruning, you can summer prune or early spring prune or both. Some people prune in summer and after leaf fall before the cold sets in.

Here is a good pruning website

http://pubs.ext.vt.edu/422/422-020/422-020.html

And here is a really good spray guide

http://www.virginiafruit.ento.vt.edu/SprayGuide/HomeFruitSprays.html

The links mentioned are written by people who are trained in commercial fruit production and contain a lot of useful info but also fail to address crucial issues to home growers that might render some of the suggestions more harmful than useful.

For example, most of the home orchards that I manage have pest raccoons and squirrels. If you fail to set up a functioning electric fence your best defense may be to train your trees with a straight trunk for their first 4 feet so that you can encircle the trunk with something that will prevent these animals from climbing up the trees or squirrels from jumping aboard. If you don't start training the trees with this intent from year one it is often difficult to impossible to do so retroactively.

Insect and disease control is much different in a home orchard than in a large commercial planting. Commercial orchards must produce pristine fruit and the large plantings are insect and fungus magnets.

Peaches will probably need protection from borers from the time they go into the ground- most other pests you can learn about as the trees mature but your most useful info will probably come from this site and not from university literature. Such literature is never up to date on the compounds available for pest control in home orchards.

OK The links are used as REFERENCES. Quit knocking good info

harvestman, is it ever possible for you to just give some good advice or do you always have to $hit a little on the person who posts just prior to you?

No one ever said to use "university" websites solely to learn how to grow. I posted them as REFERENCES to get an idea of how and what to use for certain pests and how to prune a tree. I dont understand how you can even begin to knock that info? I guess your just one of those glass half empty type of people huh? Just cause your full of decent knowledge doesnt give you the right to crap on other good advice.

Blazerguy, the references were excellent and I thank you for posting them. I'm sorry you inferred that what I said had anything to do with you. This is not a personal medium and I think both of us should just relax a bit. Yours is a personal attack on me that should only be sent via e-mail, which is forum rules.

I have a long history of voicing my concerns about the quality of advice from land grant universities to home growers here.

When I started, I relied on Cornell for a lot of my info as it was before the internet and I did become annoyed sometimes with some of the information I got, often directly from the people at the universities themselves. When someone with a PHD tells you something is so you expect them to know what they are talking about. However, there's no substitute for experience, as helpful as a formal education can be. You can't transfer information from commercial fruit production directly to home orcharding without editing by someone with a lot of experience doing the latter.

Blaze,

As a new grower of peaches I found your links very helpful, thank you for posting them.

Thanks for all the responses and links!