If there are any commercial peaches that ought to be bred and grown from seed, then Veteran is at the top of the list. It’s been around for a while—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’s nearly on the cusp of zone 3 (making it one of the hardiest of the commercial varieties), as it has withstood -29°F in central Minnesota and still borne a crop.
Freestone. Hardy to zone 4.

A Note on These Veteran Seedling Genetics

Veteran and Contender have shown the best cold hardiness of everything we’ve seen. We used to include Reliance in this category too, but that’s just not the case anymore—too many dead Reliance trees we've seen in MT.

That said, Veteran has set large crops for us in Missoula, and it survived our -10°F on 10/26/20, when many other (young 5–6 ft trees) had died—including Reliance. We weren’t growing Contender at that time, but older Contender trees around Missoula withstood that October -10°F just fine.

Why Growing from Seed Matters (Especially for Cold Climates)

Peaches have nearly 28,000 putative genes (about half of what apples have), and are often self-fertile. So there’s not as much genetic variability relative to apples. According to our friend Tom McCamant at Forbidden Fruit Orchard in Paradise, Montana, peaches were the last of the commercial fruit trees to be commonly grown from seed.

It’s our belief that growing fruit from seed is a must for cold-climate growers, as it prevents the “genetic time-capsuling” of fruit tree cultivars—and the disease susceptibility issues that can come with it.

(P.S. — Yes, we still graft and clone. We’re not absolutists—we do lots of grafting! But we also really believe in seedling-grown trees where it makes sense.)

Genetic Background of These Seedlings

These seedlings come from a Veteran mother tree. If any of the individual flowers from this batch happened to have been crossed with another peach, the pollen parent is unknown. However, we do know that:

• 3/8 of the nearby peaches were zone 5a varieties: Golden Jubilee, O’Henry, and Ranger

• 5/8 of the nearby peaches were zone 4 varieties: Reliance, Contender, Harrow Diamond, and Risingstar

So, if the seed parent crossed with one of the zone 5a peaches, that seedling would likely be zone 4b (-20°F to -25°F). If it crossed with one of the zone 4a peaches (or selfed), it would likely be zone 4a.

That gives these seedlings:

• a 38% chance of being zone 4b

• a 62% chance of being zone 4a
  And honestly, since most likely they crossed with themselves, we’d bet that each seedling has a 90%+ chance of being zone 4a.