If there are any commercial peaches that ought to be bred and grown from seed, then Veteran is at the top of the list. Veteran has been around for awhile, as it was originally selected out of Canada in 1928. The fruits are sweet, large, moderately firm, and mostly yellow in color. Veteran has a spreading growth habit and medium vigor. It is nearly on the cusp of zone 3 (making it one of the hardiest of the commercial varieties), as it has withstood -29F in central MN and borne a crop. Freestone. Hardy to zone 4.

A Note on These Veteran Seedling Genetics: Veteran and Contender have the best cold hardiness of everything we have seen. We used to put Reliance on this list, too, but this is simply not the case. Too many dead Reliance trees we’ve seen in MT. Nevertheless, Veteran has set large crops for us in Missoula, and has survived our -10F on 10/26/20 when many other (young 5-6 ft. trees) had died (including Reliance). We did not grow Contender then but older Contender trees around Missoula withstood that -10F in Oct. just fine. At any rate, peaches have nearly 28,000 putative genes (1/2 of what apple has), and are often self-fertile. So there is not as much genetic variability relative to apples and according to our friend Tom McCamant at Forbidden Fruit Orchard in Paradise, Montana, Peaches were the last of the commercial varieties to be grown from seed. It is our belief that growing fruit from seed is a must for cold climate growers as we prevent the “genetic time-capsuling” of fruit tree cultivars and the correlate issues that can result on the disease front. (p.s. we do still graft and clone and are not absolutist by any means. We do lots of grafting!). Regardless, the mother tree from whence these seeds derive was a Veteran and if an individual flower (from any of the random seeds from this batch) happened to have been crossed with another peach, then that variety is unknown. We do know that 3/8 peaches nearby (Golden Jubilee, O’Henry, and Ranger) were zone 5a, whereas the other 5/8 of the other peaches nearby were zone 4 (Reliance, Contender, Harrow Diamond, and Risingtar). So if any of the zone 5a would have crossed with these Veterans, then they would likely be zone 4b, where any of the other zone 4a would keep these seedlings right at zone 4. Therefore, these seedlings have a 38% chance of being zone 4b (-20 to -25F), and a 62% chance of being zone 4a. However, because they likely crossed with themselves, we would bet that the trees would each have 90% chance or greater of being zone 4a.

These seedlings, of which we only have about 10 available, are roughly 2-3 ft. tall and are on their own roots (seedlings) and will get to 20 ft or so at maturity.