So sorry for our our Midwest folks who have suffered such extensive losses this season. It get really hard to get excited about your fruit trees when you experience such weather extremes.
Like many others it looks like the cold wrather zapped our plums and nectaplums. The blueberries are also looming grim so this year we are going to be fruitless. Hopefully in a few years when everything else grows up we will get something when we get zapped with a late freeze. Guess its time to start looking forward to the annuals.
Like you, I sprayed water on my pears and plums although I only sprayed at the beginning of the freeze. It got down to 25F the night before and 27F last night. My pear tree leaves look damaged but my plum leaves look normal. Don’t really know why. Am sure that I lost all my fruit. I could not get the water at the highest fruit on the pear tree. Later on I will be able to see if there is any difference. Won’t try that again.
Scouting the area today, I see that the crabapples are way in advance of all the regular apples, well past green tip and heading toward pink. They ought to be toast after our 12 degree mornings, yet they appear astonishingly sound.
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Whats the best way to tell it fruitlets are toast? I cant quite tell if my plums are toast.
The ovary is what counts if that and the attached stigma are still green and turgid the fruit is still viable. When frozen all that turns brown as soon as it thaws out.
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It becomes painfully obvious after a few days…
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I can start to see my plum damage now, nearly all blossoms are wilting and darkened either a little or a lot. There are a few at the ends that still look OK. I am wishing I had delayed pruning, I pruned back long shoots and the buds at the end of the long thin shoots are the last to bloom. Fortunately I did leave a few. My Lavina generally looks OK and also the Euro plums are hopefully OK.
Last night didn’t get so cold and tonight they also bumped it up a bit so it looks like I am through this spell. 26F is forecast next Weds but at least no warming events in between. We are far from out of it still. Last year at some point I thought I made it and then one more round came and wiped some things out.
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We still have 60 days till frost free. This is so painful.
Cityman, thanks so much for your carefully written words of understanding. It’s clear you think deeply and empathize about these kinds of things, a virtuous attribute, imo.
I tried to evaluate some things at the farm today, and it’s such a mixed bag. I’m pretty sure anything close to pink was toast, but there are a few varieties which were slower to develop, and also weathered the -10F cold in Dec.
I snapped a photo today of Risingstar (one of the best survivors I think). Make no mistake, there is about half the orchard of blank trees. Who knows if we will get some more frost killing temps, but at this point I’m thinking some of these tougher trees may have survived our two days of 18F? What do you think?
Tiger, I’m so sorry to hear it. In the Midwest, winter wheat is super tough, and is even grazed with livestock in the cold months. But you are probably so far ahead of us, these damaging temps are on a whole different level when it comes to vigorous growing plants?
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Jersey looks ok so far. I am seeing the same thing in my South Jersey “orchard”
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Wheat can take much more cold than our area gets but once the heads form the grains can’t take much freezing.
I hate you got hurt again hopefully it won’t be a total loss. Peaches in our area are further along and I can’t see how any survived.
Here is one of my pomegranates. My pear’s leaves in the background were not hurt.
I lost several wheat crops and research plots near Amarillo. Those usually happened about this time of yr. It takes a while to determine the full extent of the damage. I also lost several sugarbeet crops. The spring freezes allowed replanting but the fall freezes could nearly destroy the entire crop. In fact fall freezes in back to back yrs wiped out the sugarbeet industry in Texas. About 30,000 acres were severely damaged both yrs. When frozen they can’t be pilled up and have to be dug all winter. Lots of the sugar is lost in molasses and converted to unuseable sugars.
Tiger,
Thanks for the explanation. Those pomegranates do look burnt. Hopefully, we are about done with the frost for this season.
Mark,
So sorry to hearabout the condition of your trees. I hope it will turn out better than it looks. Fingers crossed.
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I cross sectioned some plum buds tonight. Looks like some have brown pistils and some are still green. Maybe 2/5 are still green? If this is a true sample then that means they survived 3.5 F at swollen bud to bud burat stage. I am still hopeful. But like @Chikn says about 2 months until we are completely in the clear and 5 weeks to the average last frost.
Sorry to hear about everyone who has fruit farther along that lost so much. 
The recent snow melted this week. The highs for the next week are 70 today and then 65,84,65,58,60,62 the lows are 35,50,52,38,36,44. The weather as you can read is still all over the place. I would like to plant trees but there has been little to no rain this year. At my location we are averaging an inch of precipitation a month so far. I would like to graft and you can see why when the weather is making jumps to 84 again this week like it might be leading up to staying hot that way anytime now. We lost a lot of blooms already but fortunately some are still ok. Hope your all doing good with your blooms and fruitlets. Not much to do about it but like any good fruit grower I sometimes worry about stuff like this I can’t change.
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I’m still burning the midnight lamp so to say. I think I’m going on 6-7 days now. I only turned mine off during one of the sunny days earlier this week. Temps to warm up a little this weekend and I’ll pull the tarp and get a better assessment of how succesfull it was. I can compare it directly to my Scarlett Prince peach which is at the same bud stage and unprotected.
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I figure if we are at 84 in March by the time June rolls around we will be hitting triple digits. Hope your tarps worked out speedster. To add insult to injury I’m planting new trees the hard way by watering the ground first (slow going) and the cottontails are back! The hawks killed the old group so these are new bunnies seeking new territory that chose my place as a great home just as I happen to be planting apples. Better watch my back. Strange weather and new rabbits sounds like trouble to me.
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Get those hawks back to work!
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