North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Joe Hecksel <jhecksel@voyager.net>]

Hello all:

I love peaches.  They rate right up there with sweet cherries, perfectly 
ripe pears and strawberries.  Sadly, peach trees are a 5-10 year 
proposition due to borers.  I have a couple of questions for the 
collective wisdom of the group.

Are older cultivars....white peaches in particular....any more resistant 
to borers than the newer cultivars?  The reason I ask is I know of a 
tree that beat the odds for 20 years before slipping its mortal coil. 
It was a white peach.  Just luck?

Presuming I can get peaches to "take" in a Japanese-American hybrid plum 
tree, how high up do I have to graft to avoid borers?  I may have a 
faulty mental image, but the picture in my head has most of the borer 
pressure in the bottom 3' (lowest meter in Canada) of trunk.  So I 
wonder if I can top-work some plums at 4' (1.3 meters if your borers 
measure in metric), stand back and harvest delicious peaches for the 
next 25 years.

Anxiously awaiting your collective wisdom
-Joe in Eaton Rapids, Michigan....where we just got 0.5" (12.7 mm) of rain.