Article submitted to YouFarm by Roberta

I moved into the countryside 5 years ago and had to learn how to garden from scratch. One of my favourite fruits has always been nectarines, and I was keen to try growing them for myself. However, my first attempt went very wrong. I bought nectarine tree online, planted it in the middle of the garden and waited for it to grow. Come the spring though, instead of lovely, glossy, green leaves appearing, I was disappointed to find nasty, curled up and disfigured red, blotchy leaves.

I discovered that my poor little tree had falled foul of peach leaf curl, so I removed and disposed of the affected leaves, sprayed the tree with bordeaux mixture and started again. The following year, I decided to get ahead of the game and spray with bordeaux mixture early, hoping I would beat the leaf curl. Unfortunately, it was not to be so. I don't know if I'm in a particularly bad area for it, but spraying did not protect my poor little tree.

By now my little tree was looking pretty sorry for itself and hadn't managed to bear any fruit, so I decided to buy a new tree and try something different - as seen on good old Gardeners' World. Firstly, rather than buying from the cheapest source, I bought from a fruit tree specialist. Then, I planted it against a wall in a sheltered area. Most importantly, I put a sheet of protective clear plastic over the tree until after the leaves had started to form. This did the trick admirably, and I enjoyed a crop of nine tasty nectarines last year. Delicious!