Greenhouse Gardening – peaches

Traditionally peaches were always grown, across most of the UK, in either unheated or cool greenhouses. Today many peaches are grown outside, but for greenhouse fruit, selecting the right variety is key to high levels of fruit production. Some worthwhile varieties to consider for the greenhouse are

Advance – has a degree of resistance to Peach Leaf Curl.
Bellegarde – with white flesh and very large strongly flavoured fruit, it is an ideal greenhouse variety and ripens late in the year.
Doctor Hogg – is one of the largest peaches and offers mid-August fruiting.
Hylands Peach – another peach where the flesh is white, this one has a juicy, tasty flavour, and offers some resistance to Peach Leaf Curl.

Because the fruit is produced on the previous year’s wood it is usual to prune and train the tree to maintain a fan shape or cordon shape against a wall or frame, which both provides ample room for the fruits to develop and makes picking them easier.

Greenhouse peach trees tend to have compact roots and this means they need to be watered frequently during the growing season and fed once with a specialist feed once the tree has become established. You will also need to transfer pollen from flower to flower with a small paintbrush every day throughout the flowering season. Because not all of the pollen ripens at the same time this gives you the best chance of getting as many fruits as possible. To ensure good fruit setting the humidity of the greenhouse should also be raised during the pollination period. When the fruits develop, it may sometimes be necessary to thin them which you do when fruits are about the size of walnuts, - thinning out to leave around two fruits to develop per twelve inches of branch.

Greenhouse gardening peach photograph by hr icio, used under a creative commons attribution licence