Ok I have harvested three varieties of stone fruit for the first time here in my small yard in Dallas, Texas. One is a Honey Blaze nectarine and the others are Galaxy peach and Santa Rosa plum. The Honey Blaze has been awesome so far. Very large size, beautiful red color no blemishes and what a great flavor. I first started picking about a week ago and finnished tonight. I have a question, two of the nectarines I harvested tonight had turned to mush at the pointed end. It almost reminded me of blossom end rot on tomatoes. No lessions, fungal spores or bruises present just a large mushy area at the tip. Did I maybe wait a few days too long to pick or is this indicitive of another problem? Not a really big deal so far since it only happened to two fruit and the rest of the fruit looks near perfect.

On my Galaxy which has also been very good I have had a similar experience. I started picking them about a week ago and the early picked fruit looked pretty perfect. The ones I picked a few days later however had a few fruit that had some brown spots developing on the top of the fruit. On one peach the whole top half had sunken in and had started to rot. On the rest of the affected peaches there were just small brown sunken spots on the top of the fruit. Does this sound familiar? I'm wondering if a spray would help this. We did happen to have some pretty big rain storms in this harvest window and I have heard this can cause some issues with stone fruit. I have been very happy with both of these varieties so far in spite of these little problems and I appreciate any help.

Santa Rosa ripened almost a month ago for me and has been really good. No problems except maybe a little small because I under thinned them. Very tasty plums better than I thought they would be.

I hope to post more soon on my stonefruit setup. I am growing all my stone fruit in pots set up on drip and surronded with a make shift cage to keep out critters. I'll try and post some pics soon of my crazy little back yard set up and I appreciate any light anyone may be able to shed on my harvest problems.

Thanks,

Scape