Strange weather - Will it get our blooms and fruit?

I’d check a few other stations. Your north of Nashville, right? I checked a station in Springfield (don’t know how close that is to you… KTNSPRIN41) and it got about 750. The station you checked might not be reporting accurately.

MY Pluots are a little ahead of my Apricots and Aprium this year. Flavor Supreme and Grenade

I looked over Nashville weather during Dec and Jan just past. Your area has had lots of chilling. Way more than enough for pluots. Most pluots would have been fully chilled by Jan 1. So any warm weather since has been pushing bloom.

In your area warm days, above normal for winter, have good chilling at night. Cold days have good chilling during the daylight hrs. Most pluots don’t need much chilling.

I’ve had outdoor, low-chill nectarines blooming in January the last three yrs.

The Utah model is for cold winter areas, like Utah, and and higher chilling fruits than pluots.

All are fair comments that make sense. And clearly there IS something wrong with my station. Springfield is about 8 miles from me (good guess!) so if it shows that many hours, my station 8 miles away can’t be that different. SO like I said…just because it seems abnormally warm, that doesn’t mean we haven’t actually gotten a fair number of chill hours. So I guess that explains things. Thanks.

Man is it a crazy year, so glad I don’t have this going on in W MI.

The other thing to consider is growing degree days. Since you have an unknown pluot, it could very well be a low chill cultivar. And the chill units are probably pretty fuzzy. You get more or less chill units depending on which models you choose. The models are just representations that have some use for prediction.

Here are maps of growing degree days.
http://pnwpest.org/US/index.html

And a listing of phenological stages as a function of GDD’s 43 and 50F.
https://msu.edu/~shane/phenology/phenGDD1.htm

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I just put in a flavor grenade from bare roots this Jan— it’s popping now. However its potential asian plum pollinators don’t show signs of waking up yet (Satsuma, Santa Rosa). I’m going to assume the transplanting shocked it into blooming early. I do have a Gold Kist apricot blooming now – I may hand pollinate with some of its blooms to see if I can set any fruit with apricot pollen.

It was likely fully chilled before it was shipped to you. Say in Modesto.

By the way Valley Center, CA sounds like a great place to be a fruit grower…!!

You are probably correct, DWN estimates are 200 hrs for Flavor Grenade – it is the lowest chill of the Zaiger pluot bunch. I have no complaints about Valley Center, CA. So what if I can’t accumulate enough chill for a Bing cherry?

You could but I’m not sure it would be worth the effort. I can manage 2,000+ hrs in my greenhouse using shade and evaporative cooling. Our averages outside in winter are 60/30. In the greenhouse it would hit 120 most days without cooling.

My Bings last yr were amazing, 32 brix, high acid, and crunchy.

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I’ve pretty much discounted the standard 32-45 degree chill hour accumulation data for my area. This year I’m only at 210 chill hours (CH), with 900 postive utah hours. If I went by recommended CH most of my trees would be poor choices for my area. I’m focusing more on the chill portions (CP) model, which makes more sense to me based on my background in biochemistry. Unfortunately cultivar CP estimates aren’t as readily available as CH’s, nor is there a strong direct relationship between the two methods. My temperatures oscillate between the 45-60 degree range most of the winter, with brief spikes into the 70s.

Yeah…hopefully we don’t pull a March 2012

Down to small areas of ice and snow here…most yards are all grass. Colder air moving in for tomorrow…upper 40Fs this afternoon…still not sure how warm we get Fri-Mon… could still be looking at a 60F or better…

I remember that a lot of local Orchards got screwed on that deal.

I’m proud of everyone here for not using this thread as an excuse to start another long, heated, no-win debate about global warming (and especially hope my comment doesn’t change that). I’m not so interested in the CAUSE of this years weather or even if it is a sign of what the future holds or just a short-term anomaly. But it is very interesting to learn more about chill hours, what other people are experiencing this year, and so on. SO I’ve enjoyed this discussion and thank others for their input.

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It’s never good when the year starts like this…

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Levers

The links you posted are very interesting. I checked my degree days and then tried to match the stage of my peaches and apples against the Cornell chart.

Fortunately, I’m not as far ahead as the Cornell chart would suggest.

Also, I wonder if the proper time to start counting degree days is the first of the new year. The NC State Blueberry Chill Hour model starts accumulating hours on October 1 of the previous year. I’m at about 1350 hours at the moment.

I think chilling you count from the fall and growing degree days from Jan 1st?

Rick - I think Michigan State usually starts counting degree days at March 1. My guess is that in Michigan, as in Iowa, there is little concern of chilling units having been met by sometime in early March.

October 1 seems like an early date to start accumulating chill hours to me. Do chill units accumulate even when leaves are on the trees (or blueberries)? Here only the black walnuts have lost their leaves by Oct 1.

This weekend looks amazingly mild…right into MON/TUEs…

70F for Chicago? All the upper midwest should be way above normal.

[sigh] So it does