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["Alan Haigh" <alandhaigh@gmail.com>]

I've grown the Reliance peach in a few sites and it is not bad in my opinion.  It will size up about like Redhaven if adequately thinned, but most years it's not as good.  It doesn't ripen until it's soft but the texture is fine and the flesh is attractive with lots of red streaks.  The skin doesn't have a lot of color but this can be considered an advantage because it makes a peach less attractive to birds.  If it was the only tree ripened peach I'd ever eaten, I'd rave about it.  The thing is that there are better peaches in its season and in the last 18 years the peach crop has only been frozen out once here during a test winter.  Reliance was frozen out that year as well as there is a very narrow window in which Reliance buds survive and others like Redhaven and Madison are killed.

 

The amount of sugar and other issues of quality in a peach can be greatly affected by soil, weather, and especially sun exposure as most of you probably know so it should not come as a surprise that the same cultivar would perform differently in different locations.  This is something that I've witnessed time and again, often without a reasonable explanation for the difference in performance.