After waiting all winter, it can be utterly disappointing to watch your peach tree go from bare to leaves without a bloom in sight. Discovering the reason behind your tree's bloom-less state takes a little bit of research because the causes have typically occurred in the past.
The most common cause of a lack of blooms on a peach tree is that it is immature. While some peach trees may start blooming when they are four years old, others may not mature until they are 10 years old.
Too Much Fertilizer
While fertilizer might seem like a good thing, providing your peach trees with too much can actually cause it not to bloom. Fertilizer, especially nitrogen, encourages vegetative growth rather than reproductive growth in fruit trees.
Lack of Nutrients
If your peach tree is lacking phosphorus or potassium, it may not bloom. The best way to find out is to do a soil test. Soil tests are often provided by garden centers and county extension offices.
Drought stress will cause a peach tree to jump into survival mode, which means it stops producing flowers or fruit. If your tree experienced dry conditions the previous summer or fall, when flower buds are initiated, it may fail to bloom the following spring.
If your peach tree produced a particularly heavy crop one year, it will reduce its production the following year. You can prevent this from happening by thinning the crop if it gets too heavy and pruning heavily after a light crop to prevent fruit overload.
Peach trees require plenty of light in order to bloom. If your tree is planted in a shady location, there may not be enough light for it to bloom. Also, if the tree has not been pruned properly to allow a structure that is open to sunlight, the tree may not bloom properly.
Temperature fluctuations during the winter or spring can kill your trees' blooms. Warm weather can encourage buds to develop. However, if they develop too soon, and the weather suddenly turns cold, these buds may be killed off. If a frost or freeze is experienced after the tree has stopped being dormant, chances are the blooms have been killed.
Not Enough Chilling Time
If the chilling time required by your peach tree is not met correctly, your peach tree may not bloom. If the tree does not receive enough chilling hours, it will bloom erratically and produce deformed leaves.
Too Much Chilling Time
On the other end of the spectrum, a tree that receives more chilling time that it needs also has trouble producing blooms. This problem is similar to the issue with temperature. Once a peach tree has received enough cold weather, any warm weather will trigger it to break out of its dormancy and start to develop. This can cause blooms to develop too soon and they end up being killed by any freezing temperatures.
If you peach tree is blooming on its top branches, but not its lower ones, you may have a problem with deer. Deer will often nibble on fruit trees and remove the flower buds as high as they can reach.