I’m surprised I haven’t seen anyone talking about what, if any, damage they had from the winter. I’ve been nervously watching my peaches since we had the -2 temperature very late this winter/early spring. Today I 100% confirmed what I had feared…almost all my peach trees had all their buds killed. I am devastated and could just about cry! This was going to be my first year to get more than a few odd peaches. What is so strange is that last year was much colder here and I didn’t loose a single peach bud. I also know many of you have WAY colder lows than me and your peaches still fruit. I’m sure its because my buds had already started to swell quite a bit when we had that late freeze-which was only one single night! GRRR!
Amazingly, 3 of my 5 plums also lost their buds and all 3 of my apricots did (that is less of a surprise though). Strangely, it looks like my June princess nectarine and my Elberta peach are going to have blooms. In short, my little orchard just got devastated. I’m trying to think positive-my trees will get to grow more than they would have with fruit, I’ll have to spray less than I would have with fruit on board, and will be able to focus more on my watermelons. But I’d much rather have had fruit!
Anyway, I’d be interested in hearing if the rest of you got hit this hard. Since I haven’t heard anything I’m guessing not, but it would be interesting to hear from others.
BTW, I’m in north middle TN, zone 6b/7a.
I was wondering how that cold episode turned out. I’m sorry to hear it was bad. We haven’t had winter kill but have lost open flowers to 21-22F on two occasions. The rest are opening now with another month of freeze possibilites to come. That’s why I have a greenhouse. I’ve probably seen 50 damaging spring freezes in TX. Usually more than one a yr just like this yr.
Winter didn’t kill anything here. Like you Cityman, I was a bit worried about the really warm spell dehardening everything in Jan. Then it got close to zero. We had another warm spell in March, followed by about 5F weather. Still no damage.
Our coldest temp of the winter was 2F.
Like Fruitnut, we have about a month of freeze possibilities left. Each week there is less risk, but the risk won’t be completely gone until about the end of April.
I expect to have earliest peaches blooming by Tues. Some are just now showing a tiny bit of pink.
Our winter low was -9F, but everything was completely dormant at the time, so I’m not expecting any peach injury. I’m worried about my Asian persimmons though.
We’ve got a while to go before bloom, as we just got another 6" of snow. In fact, it is still snowing as I type. Over the last two weeks, most of my snow had melted and I’ve been planting trees. My Cummins order arrived today, but it will probably be a few days the new snow melts.
I’m still not sure, but they look dead to me, all of them on the peaches and pluots for a 2nd year in a row. Our low was -16F.
How can you tell if they are dead?
The buds are all brown inside, not green. I wanted to cut mine up and graft anyway. So I planned on sacrificing most of the fruit anyway.
Weather is such a strange and unpredictable phenomenon! Its bizarre how many of you live in places that traditionally are much colder than me, and yet I’m the one who got hit so hard! Oh well. Asimpson- Drew is right about how to tell if they are dead. I have been cutting mine open for 2 weeks and seeing a bit of brown in the middle. But I wasn’t 100% convinced of how hard I’d been hit until I was looking at my trees yesterday and I noticed that if I just bumped a limb, all the buds were falling off like snow and were not just dead but dried out. The dead ones managed to cling to the tree for 2 weeks or more so I kept trying to convince myself that many were still alive. Not anymore. Its so bad that if you look on the ground under my trees, you see its covered with little dead and dried buds. And of course there are none left on the trees. Its a devastatingly depressing site for me. It got peaches, plums, and apricots. Such is the life of a fruit tree grower I suppose.
Cityman:
It is depressing!! The only thing that might be worse is a devastating hail storm. Then everything; leaves, bark, and fruit are all mashed and broken.
I hope you have something left. Hang in there. Next yr will likely be better.
It’s like baseball, you hope your team makes it to the play offs, and even maybe win the pennant, and to win the world series, wow! But I’m beginning to feel like a Cubs fan!
Sometime check out the song by Steve Goodman “A dying Cubs fan last request”.
Sometimes fruit growing feels like the NCAA tournament brackets. They look so good going in but in no time flat it all blows up in your face!!! Ah but next yr I’ve got a plan and we try it all over again.
As an alumni and huge University of KY fan, I’m certainly having much better luck with the NCAA tourney than I am with fruit trees! But seriously, fruitnut…I sincerely appreciate the words of encouragement. Most of the time I spend here is just a reminder of how much I don’t know, and I’ve had just about every malady that can hit fruit trees in the short existence of my orchard, and now this. So I really needed a little encouragement! I’m about to start grafting and if is last year is any indication, that won’t go much better. What’s funny is that in spite of all this, I absolutely love this hobby and am thrilled that I stumbled into it. So words of encouragement are certainly appreciated.
I still can’t tell entirely what i have (with trees that are in the ground/outside…not potted trees)…but the Satsuma’s look like they made it, the apricots is full of fruit buds (swelling now), sweet cherries are full… I think i might see some nectarines buds swelling, but not positive. It turned cold the last few days (40fs) and snow today…so everything is just kind of stuck here for the moment. Doesn’t look like i’ll see any bloom until April at this rate.
I haven’t observed any negative impact due to the weather here. Even though we did have one night that reached lower than I recall in the last 20 years (12^) , it was a cool week preceding that low. So, the vegetation was braced for it. Trees blossomed one to two weeks later than normal, but that was actually to my benefit. It’s been a good spring for mating honeybees. New queen bees only have a short window of days in which to mate, and if the weather during that time is too wet, windy, or cold, mating is poor and the hives do not thrive.
Between the late flowering, and the good mating season, along with prime delivery dates, I should have well mated queens, and my new bees for the year arrived before the fruit trees and holly completed flowering. They arrived in time to enjoy a bit of bee paradise.
I do, however, have indirect negative consequences from the winter - a delayed Raintree order and a severe delay in part of my Nourse order. Trees need as much time as possible to establish before our hot summers with insufficient rain. I think late shipment to here can have a large negative effect, if not directly on the tree, than on the amount of time I have to devote to caring for them during the stressful summer.
With Nourse, my day neutral strawberries, that really are treated as annuals here and would have preferred to have been inground by late Jan, early Feb, are still sitting in frozen ground under snow. Fine for Northerners, but if they arrive here dormant in April, I’m going to have to get very creative in order to have them do middling to poorly for the year.