Veteran Peach

Overview

Veteran is one of the hardier commercial varieties of peaches, and is known for reliable crops, later blooming (helpful for dodging spring frosts), and flavorful yellow freestone fruit when fully ripe.

Origin and History

Veteran is a Canadian peach developed at Vineland, Ontario and widely reported as being introduced in 1928. 
Multiple nursery and catalog references report its parentage as Vaughn × Early Elberta.

Fruit & Uses

Veteran produces medium to large peaches with yellow flesh and good classic peach flavor. Freestone when fully ripe. The flavor in Missoula is sweet and tangy, but with an intense peach aroma, especially when picked tree ripened. Somewhat similar in flavor to Contender.

Growth Habit & Spacing

Veteran is vigorous and productive. These are grafted onto Manchurian apricot rootstock, which produce a more demi-dwarf peach (relative to apples) at around 15 ft depending on depth of soils and climate.

Pollination

Veteran is self-fruitful (self-fertile), like most peach cultivars, meaning a single tree can set fruit on its own. That said, an additional peach planted nearby, ideally Contender, can improve fruit set. 

Cold Hardiness

Veteran withstood -26°F from a polar front that hit on 1/13/24 at our friend Kate Wilburn's house in Missoula. Luke actually planted this tree back in 2018. It was grafted onto Lovell peach rootstock, and the tree is currently about 15 ft. tall. Something interesting happened that following Spring after that polar front. We took scionwood cuttings for bench grafting and weirdly enough, none the wood was good. The cells of the shoots (from the previous year) were all damaged. This was in March. However, the tree budded out that Spring as though nothing had happened. The flower buds were all badly damaged and it didn't set fruit that year. 

Certainly not as hardy as Siberian C peach (the hardiest in our experience). Veteran is probably second to only Contender in terms of hardiness of the named varieties. Contender is hardy to -32F in our experience, whereas Veteran may trail this slightly (this is simply conjecture based on field observations), but it is unlikely that it is hardier than Contender.

People often ask about Reliance, which is not as hardy in our experience as many claim (we've seen more dead Reliance than we can count on our hands and feet, (and other people's hands and feet). That said, Tom McCamant, who has been growing Reliance, Contender, Veteran, and many other varieties in a warm microclimate in Paradise, MT, argues Reliance is the hardiest in terms of mid-winter hardiness, but is perhaps the least hardy in terms of Fall hardiness. And I'd argue many of the dead Reliance's we have seen were planted within a year or two of when MT experienced brutal Fall flash frosts in October (2019 and 2020) in which we hit subzero at the end of Oct. 2019, and Missoula saw -10F on 10/25/2020. Had these trees been bigger and more established (regardless of cultural practices/tapering off water in the Fall), perhaps Reliance could have survived these.