With nearly two months left until the 2024 Lunar New Year, peach farmers in various localities throughout the province are busy with the tasks of caring for and pruning the trees to ensure they bloom in time for Tet.
Currently, Tu Dan commune (Khoai Chau district) has about 60 acres of peach orchards, mainly concentrated in Man Xuyen, Nam Mau, and Toan Thang villages. To ensure the trees grow well and bloom in time for the Lunar New Year, peach growers here regularly monitor weather forecasts to adjust their care regimen accordingly.
With over 1,000 ornamental peach trees and about 1,200 peach trees for pruning, at this time of year, Mr. Hoang Van Thanh in Man Xuyen village, Tu Dan commune, regularly hires 10-13 additional laborers to strip the leaves so that the trees will bloom in time for Tet (Lunar New Year). Mr. Thanh said: "After caring for the ornamental garden all year, now is the crucial time to determine whether the trees will bloom for Tet or not. Stripping the leaves at the right time is very important. Around the beginning of November in the lunar calendar, I start stripping the leaves so that the trees can concentrate nutrients on bud formation, ensuring that the buds are numerous, evenly distributed, and the petals are large... Usually, I strip the leaves twice, each time about a week apart. This leaf stripping will cause the trees to bloom in overlapping waves. After stripping the leaves, I will adjust the care according to the weather, 'stimulating' or 'slowing down' the trees so that they have many buds, large buds, vibrant colors, and flowers that bloom at the right time for Tet..."
According to many residents in Tu Dan commune, this year's unfavorable weather has made caring for peach blossoms more difficult for farmers. Growers must be skillful, meticulous, and painstaking, knowing how to calculate the weather to divide the stages of leaf stripping and care. Ms. Nguyen Thi Thao, Chairwoman of the Farmers' Association of Tu Dan commune, said: Compared to other crops, growing peach blossoms brings high income, so in recent years, people in the commune have focused on investing in expanding the area.
Visiting Quang Chau commune (Hung Yen city) in early November of the lunar calendar, farmers are busy tending to their peach trees in their orchards. The commune currently has nearly 30 households growing peach trees, covering an area of over 8 hectares. Thanks to their extensive experience in planting and caring for the trees, the peach blossoms grown in Quang Chau commune are very beautiful and highly sought after in the market.
According to peach growers here , peach cultivation is labor-intensive, requires meticulous attention, and is heavily dependent on the weather. To grow trees with beautiful shapes and well-developed branches, farmers spend a whole year caring for them, and also need experience and advanced techniques to create unique and unusual trees from simple, rustic peach tree trunks.
Having been involved in peach tree cultivation for nearly 20 years, Mr. Duong Van Hien from Hamlet 2, Quang Chau Commune, shared: "To grow a peach tree with a beautiful shape and many buds, growers must be meticulous and careful in every step of the care process, such as fertilizing, pruning, shaping, girdling branches, and removing leaves... The leaf-removing process is very important; if done at the right time and in favorable weather conditions, the tree will bear the desired fruit."
In addition, peach tree garden owners in the province also provide care services for ornamental peach trees for people who need it. Customers are mainly agencies, organizations, and individuals who often buy large, valuable peach trees worth tens of millions of dong and entrust them to their care. Planting and caring for peach trees must follow the correct procedures and techniques from the very beginning, as mistakes can affect the tree's development, growth, and flowering. To achieve this, garden owners need to be experienced.
According to information from the Crop Production Department (Department of Agriculture and Rural Development), peach trees are currently widely grown in communes such as Tu Dan (Khoai Chau), Tan Quang (Van Lam); Trung Nghia, Quang Chau (Hung Yen city)... To ensure beautiful blossoms for Tet (Lunar New Year), along with caring for the trees, growers must strip the leaves at the right time, depending on the weather each year, the variety of tree, whether the tree is healthy or weak, young or old... Stripping peach leaves is considered a very important step, requiring careful attention and calculation from the grower, with the aim of allowing the tree to concentrate nutrients on bud formation, ensuring that the flower buds are numerous, evenly distributed, plump, the flowers are large, have thick petals, beautiful colors, and bloom at the right time for Tet.
Besides applying techniques and experience to care for the trees, people closely monitor weather developments to take timely care measures. They monitor the growth of the peach trees to take timely measures to encourage or inhibit flowering. Specifically: If by the beginning of December in the lunar calendar, the flower buds are not clearly visible, they must be encouraged by fertilizing, loosening the soil around the base, and watering with warm water; by the end of November in the lunar calendar, if the flower buds are large and may bloom early, they need to be inhibited by shading the tree from sunlight, creating shade, not watering, and using a knife to make a circular cut around the trunk to cut through the bark…
Huong Giang
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