Well, it’s a balmy 62(?!?) at midnight, it was very comfortable today, after we had 12 Thu morn and 11 Fri morn. But it’s really windy now due to a front moving thru, with some heavy rain overnight. Might get a dusting of snow late morn, and then back down to 20 Sun night. A real rollercoaster of weather this week, but things will be more seasonable next week, with no white Christmas. Would like to see one, but family are coming in from OK this week, and they need good driving weather. The snow can wait until February as far as I’m concerned.
Stay warm folks out there in the Midwest, can’t say I envy yer situation!
I’ll take the subzeros when it means we were on the cold side of the freeze/thaw line as yesterday’s storm went thru - light cold snow a lot better than ice and frozen slush
Airport shows -15F and i got -14F at the house. Shouldn’t go above zero until sometime tomorrow. Then a nice warming trend…but another cold shot maybe next weekend. After that though it looks very mild right through the 1st of Jan/
Full sun today and a high of -5F. Luckily i don’t have much for peaches in the ground except for a few grafts… i guess we’ll find out in the spring…still several months of this stuff.
We got down to -10F at a thermometer here at the house. Very cold.
Concerned about my trees. I have young peach trees which still had some green leaves because they haven’t hardened off yet. It’s entirely possible I lost them. Also good chance the blackberry crop is mostly gone.
I’ve not had a situation yet where I had young peach trees still in leaf and it got this cold this quick. It can get cold here in Dec. (the record is -16F in Dec. 1989) but usually it’s Jan. before we get anything near this cold.
Most winters it gets to around zero for a low, or perhaps a few degrees colder, so this is already one of the more harsher winters for my area.
I’ve read sometimes the cold will kill the trunks before it kills the tops, so that in the spring a peach tree will leaf out and then collapse.
In general it takes several days of warmer weather to see the frozen damage on things like blooms. I’ll probably wait a few weeks and scrape the trunks on some young trees to see if the cambium is still alive.
The buds themselves can be checked by razor knifing them to see if there is brown in the middle. I don’t think we’ve quite met chill requirement yet, so I don’t think it would do much good to cut some shoots and bring them inside in a vase to see if they bloom.
Yes 77F drop in 36 hrs. As that front rolled southward yesterday in west Texas the temperature was dropping as much as 40F in a matter of minutes with wind gusts to 84 mph.
I can tell you that I experienced what you have said about the trunk died before the top. My 10 varieties multi-grafted stone fruits died 2 years ago. All the varieties leafed out then died. I had to re-grafted all of the varieties again this past Spring.
That will more than likely cause some serious tree damage.
I am hoping for the best here. We have had several days of temps in the teens and a few single digits over the last couple of weeks leading up to this cold blast. Everything but a few apple varieties had dropped their leaves before this last cold blast. Hoping everything was hardened off enough to handle this blast.
Our rapid temperature changes are hard on marginally hardy things like figs. But I don’t think that will hurt peaches and other fruits hardy to say -12F. That assumes they were reasonably well hardened off.
Figs in Texas often aren’t hardy even in zones as warm as 8b. They certainly aren’t hardy here in 7b/8a.
Three below here this morning, I hope my peach blossoms survived. Looks like we are headed down in the same range tonight. I have several seedling peaches that have just lost their leaves , I hope they don’t have the issue Mark describes.
Checked the 10 day forecast. Looks like highs in the 50s and 60s, lows in the 40s, high 30s. Might have to break out the long-sleeve shirts.
In all fairness, when ya’ll are enjoying your nice 85 degree summer days with gentle breezes, we’re 100+ with 100% humidity, and have more bugs and diseases than you can shake a stick at.
It all balances out, I think.
Unless you live in Oklahoma. For which I can only say: Sorry.
