That’s how I feel. At least I’m doing something even if it’s not optimal. The feeling of despair coming out and seeing everything frozen is hard to overcome. If I tried to make a difference and fail, that feels different. My trees are too big to cover for the most part. You definitely need to get the cover on before winds pick up. I’ve made many a trip to goodwill in a la st ditch effort to find king size sheets. I also bought all the rolled burlap that lowes had one year. I go out with twine, clothespins, chip clips, anything that will help me hold the cover on. It’s probably a hilarious sight to the neighbors.
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I use Excel high rise wobblers. I only have about 20 pai from my orchard frost free hydrant so I need something that will operate under low pressure. I think it suggests 40 feet in diameter but I doubt I get that. I was surprised to learn something you probably know intuitively that the end of the line sprinkler operates the best. I have six sprinklers connected by flat hose. There was a lot of testing and adjusting that went on to try and find the best arrangement. I used a high flow splitter to divide them into two sets of three sprinklers, but I ran them all at the same time.
This guy has the best video and I used it to build my own.
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I almost laughed when I read the part about running into a burlap wrapped tree; but caught myself knowing what a dangerous operation you were carrying out. People do all kinds of stuff to save their fruit trees in the spring. I have too many to do all that work. So I started letting Mother Nature have her way. You may already know that we all have, on average, about 4,000 weeks in our lives…some more or less than others. So,at my age, whenever I lose a year of peaches or Kiwi it really hurts.
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I am surely happy for your results. And what beautiful photo evidence you’ve provided. Especially the next to the last photo with the field in the distance.
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Yep. A lot of care and work involved there. The neighbors might laugh but not when they see the peaches in July or August.
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Did you cover your fruit trees in addition to the Christmas lights? Also how did the heat lamps work? I’m trying to save some apricots from frost. Thanks!
I did. Fortunately the freeze was not severe enough for me to see a difference between protected and not protected.
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Glad to hear you didn’t have any damage! What temperature was the freeze and were the apricots already in their fruitlet stage?
This Utah State University / Washington State University chart on “Critical Temperatures for Frost Damage on Fruit Trees” for apples, apricots, pears, cherries, and peach/nectarine is really handy, showing the vunerable bud and flower stage temperatures:
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I didnt have any apricots to protect last year. It got down to 30f at the ground, but not cold enough to kill mulberry foliage 6 ft high.
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