Scarlet Prince Peach

Plant Hardiness Zones 5-8

Peaches are one of the easier fruits to grow at home and certainly one of the most worthwhile. Because of their delicate flesh, commercial peaches are picked while still hard and often do not ripen well off the tree. So to enjoy the true taste of a perfect peach you need to have your own tree and let those peaches ripen right on the branch until they are colorful, fragrant and yield to the touch. Only then will they be loaded with sweet and delicious juice and be the perfect texture for eating. Scarletprince is a newer variety of peach that has been carefully bred to have a beautiful red skin and delicious yellow flesh that slips easily from the stone. It will produce a big crop of large peaches from just one tree, making this the ideal peach for the smaller garden. Not only is this a useful tree, it is a beautiful one as well and the rich-pink blossoms that will cover the bare branches each spring are a joy to see and make Scarletprince a great addition to your flower garden.

The Scarletprince Peach tree is a vigorous tree that will begin to bear fruit after just a couple of years of growth. It does not need a second peach tree to produce its delicious fruit and the tree is hardy with good disease resistance. It will grow best in a sunny, sheltered spot in loamy, well-drained soil, but it will grow in most soils that do not hold a lot of water. If your soil is naturally heavy, with lots of clay, then dig plenty of rich organic material like garden compost or well-rotted manure into the soil and plant your tree on a six-inch mound. If you can, plant your tree on a south-facing slope, not in a hollow where a late spring frost may gather and damage the baby peaches.

Scarletprince is a variety of peach bred in 1989 by the famous United States Department of Agriculture peach breeder, Dr. William “Dick” Okie. He worked in Georgia and focused on breeding peaches that were disease-resistant and reliable croppers in variable seasons. Scarletprince has been tested as far north as New Jersey and has proved to be a first-class variety with fruit of an outstanding quality that will crop well in cooler areas and even during years that are not ideal for peach growing. This variety will ripen from late June to early August, depending on which zone you are growing your tree in.

Choose a sunny, sheltered location to plant your tree. Sun is very important for peaches both to encourage flowering and to ripen the fruit. Prepare the soil well with plenty of rich organic material and plant the tree in a hole three times the width of the pot. Place your plant at the same depth as it was in the pot and with a sharp knife cut one inch deep from top to bottom of the root-ball in three or four places around the tree. This will encourage the roots to spread outwards. Replace most of the soil in the hole and then fill it with plenty of water. When all the water has drained away, replace the rest of the soil. Cover the root-zone with some more organic material as mulch and replace this each spring, moving further out as the root-zone grows. Do not let weeds or grass grow under your tree. Keep the mulch away from the trunk of your tree. Keep your tree well-watered in summer and do not allow it to become completely dry.

The Scarletprince Peach is a special tree that is the result of many years of careful breeding. It must be produced from trees known to be the proper variety. Our trees are produced the correct way, by grafting stems from accurately-named trees onto sturdy roots that will control the size of your tree and protect it from disease. Avoid cheaper seedling trees that take many, many years to even start producing what will be very inferior fruit.

Start pruning your peach as soon as you plant it. Shorten back the branches a little and encourage your tree to develop outward-spreading branches with no upright branches in the centre of the tree. You can use string attached to stones to train the branches to grow outwards rather than upwards. At the end of each winter remove all upright-growing branches from the centre of your tree and shorten back the shoots on the main branches. Always keep your tree open in the centre to let the sun right inside the tree, or you will only get fruit on the ends of the branches. When the young fruits are the size of a quarter, remove some to leave one healthy fruit every 6 to 8 inches along the branches. This will produce large fruit with plenty of flesh. If you leave too many fruits they will be small and mostly stone. Scarletprince is a heavy-cropping tree and there will still be lots of peaches to pick.

Our Scarletprince Peach trees are true to the original form and we always give you the best plant for your purpose. However we are constantly renewing our stock so that our customers receive fresh, healthy plants. Supplies of this very popular new variety are always limited, so to avoid disappointment order now.