Nectarine - Growing Experience In The Northern Garden

Nectarines - the first crop of a capricious crop

More than thirty fruit trees are now growing in the orchard on our site, about the same number of berry bushes. In addition to the usual ones - apple trees, pears, plums, gooseberries and currants, it also contains grapes, cherries, actinidia, gum, sweet cherry plums and nectarines, which are still rare in our gardens. I also want to tell you about the last of the listed cultures.

The history of their appearance in our garden is associated with the famous farmer-breeder from Smolensk, Yuri Mikhailovich Chuguev. In the spring of 2002, he came to St. Petersburg, gave lectures to gardeners, and he brought his own seedlings. I then bought five varieties of grapes from him, sweet cherry plum and three varieties of nectarine - Nayden, Little Mouse and July Rose. They were three-year-olds with a closed root system, grafted onto thorns, good, strong plants. I planted them in the warmest place on the southern slope, following all the recommendations of a well-known breeder.

Over the summer, the seedlings gave a good growth, and in the fall I sprinkled their trunks with peat, tied the seedlings with spruce branches. It would seem that she did everything for a successful wintering, but the winter of 2002-2003 was very harsh, and these, in general, thermophilic newly planted plants did not survive it - their entire above-ground part froze out.

Of course, we were very offended, but in May-June new shoots appeared on them right at the vaccination site. It was difficult to determine right away whether the wilds were growing or the cultivated shoots, so we left all three trees and waited for the results for a long time. The first flowering of nectarines was in 2006 and 2007, but the fruits did not set then. Two varieties - Naydena and Little Mouse by this time already had the appearance of fully mature cupped trees, but the nectarine of the July rose variety was thin and frail. Perhaps the reason for this was a huge bush of common hazel growing nearby, shading it from the sun. Perhaps the effects of frostbite continued to affect.

In the spring of 2008, all three trees bloomed profusely, and I noticed that the flowers on the weakest plant were larger than on the other two. In the same year, my husband began to build a gazebo nearby, and the hazel bush had to be removed, and as a result, this nectarine was in a sunny place. He successfully bloomed and laid about 20 ovaries, which, despite the rather cold, rainy and windy past summer, developed, increasing in size. But the other two plants have faded, but they have not formed a single ovary. Let's see what will happen to them this year. If they turn out to be wild, you can try to vaccinate them.

And while we watched the fruits of the July rose with pleasure and anxiety, the winds were very strong last summer; its thin twigs bent, wobbled, but she did not throw off a single fruit. By the end of August, they began to color, and they were the size of a small chicken egg - for nectarines, of course, this is small, but we hope that in a warmer summer the fruits will be larger.

We took our first crop of nectarines in early October, they were very strong, but already dark cherry in color. After laying for only two weeks, the fruits acquired an excellent taste. They were sweet, very juicy with a distinct peach flavor. We have been waiting for results for a long time, and it is good that at least one nectarine turned out to be appropriate to its name.

We very much hope that now every year it will delight with its fruits, unusual for our northern latitudes.

These long-awaited and unusually tasty fruits were the most joyful event in the past summer cottage season.

And the second joy for me is another “creation” of my husband - a garden gazebo. He made it pentagonal. Two walls, forming a right angle, are deaf to cover the unsightly neighbor's shed. But the rest of its sides are almost completely open, only vines of blue grapes twine around them. Located in a remote corner of the garden, this gazebo invites you to privacy and quiet relaxation, while hanging bunches of grapes and nectarine fruits create the illusion of the south in our northern region.