Your backyard provides a large space where you can create a comfortable and beautiful outdoor space and also plant a vegetable garden and fruit trees. If you plant peach trees, you will be able to pick fresh peaches through the summer and enjoy the shade the trees provide, but there are some tips you should follow to ensure the health and success of your trees. Here are some tips to help you maintain and take care of your backyard peach tree.

Prune Your Tree

One of the most common type of neglect you can do to your peach tree is not pruning it regularly, or in each season. A peach tree growing on its own naturally will grow tall and bushy and not reach its most abundant fruit production. But by trimming your peach tree's branches, you can maximize the tree's sturdiness and growth and get a good crop of peaches.

Pruning your peach tree is recommended in early spring before the buds begin to blossom. This pruning is to remove the excessive sprout growth and old dead growth and stimulate the tree's new growth and fruit production. When a peach tree grows unpruned, the excessive branch growth will take away from the fruit production to give you fewer or smaller peaches.

You can hire professional tree pruning services to trim and prepare your peach tree for each season. They will handle crowding of branches and growth of trunk sprouts and trim off branches to prompt the tree's growth in a healthy and productive manner.

Plant Garlic

Your peach tree is susceptible to many types of tree diseases and pests that can harm and eventually kill your entire tree. Fortunately, you can use safe pesticides and other treatments to protect your peach tree each year.

A borer beetle is a common type of threat to peach trees, and it will chew its way under the peach tree's bark and sucks the juices from the tree and harm it. One easy way to protect your peach tree and its trunk from a borer beetle is to plant garlic bulbs around the base of the trunk. The odor from the growing garlic bulbs helps repel the borer beetles from the area and protects your peach tree. Then you will also have a stock of fresh garlic growing around your peach tree.

Mulch Appropriately

If you choose to use mulch around your peach trees to help keep moisture in the soil or improve the appearance of your yard, be sure to use the mulch in the right manner around your fruit trees. When you spread mulch on the soil around the base of your tree, be sure to leave a gap of space immediately around the trunk. You don't want mulch to be touching your tree's trunk, as this can cause rot and other diseases to settle into the tree.