I’m watching the Weather Channel today, they’re calling for a “crippling” ice storm mostly in the Kansas-Missouri areas this weekend. Plus, some “damaging” ice from OK to Iowa and Illinois.
@Olpea, and @clarkinks, how do you prepare your trees for something like this?
That’s a great question subdood!
I’ve pruned all my trees (except about 25 apples and 25 plums) so I think that might help some. I still have some minor pruning to do (on peaches) but wanted to wait until I could see what the winter lows and spring frosts left of the crop.
I didn’t prune the peach trees because of a possible ice storm, but that’s one small benefit (I pruned them in the early fall strictly because of labor. I don’t have time to prune them in the late spring/early summer, so I do most of it in the fall.)
The downside to pruning so early (in the fall) is that it makes the peach trees a bit more winter tender. I still don’t know how much fruit was lost from the unusually early and severe -10F weather we received in Dec. I need to take examine some cuttings of some of the more winter tender varieties (like PF 9-007) and see how many viable buds are left. Generally spring frosts are the nemesis for peaches here, but this cold event in Dec. was a bad one. If we get some significant spring frosts after bloom, we could have a lot of blank peach trees.
All that is to say I’m not too worried about the ice storm coming. Most of my trees are trained to handle a lot of weight of fruit, so I think they will handle the ice OK, especially since I’ve pruned the big stuff off.
I’m up in WI, but I fly out for work Monday and they have advisories/offers to rebook throughout the upper AND lower Midwest…
that said, I’m not much help here, most of my trees are basically glorified whips right now…
My pears are mostly small but the larger ones for the most part have fairly good branch structure. If we receive the predicted 1/2 " of ice expected it will break some limbs which will cost me some fruit next year.
I remember a bad ice storm back around Jan 2001 in OK, it devastated a wide area in the middle of the state. It hit around Christmas, and my poor grandmother, who lived in the SE part of the state, was without power for almost two weeks. We couldn’t even go visit her because the roads were impassible with ice. We went back a few weeks later to help clean up her yard of all the damaged trees. That area just got shredded. You could tell years later that there had been an ice storm because trees had that split, flat top look to them.
We will hope for the best and plan for the worst.
I thought y’all had a bad late frost last spring? How did that affect your production? Does a really hard freeze like y’all had in Dec ruin the chances for a peach tree to fruit the next year, regardless of a late spring frost?
Peaches up here are evidently hit or miss, they are lucky to get a peach crop because of the very late spring frosts. They will get peaches here maybe once out of three or four years. We had a hard freeze around May 16, so I imagine that’s what did the peaches in. Apples did OK, tho.
I absolutely remember that! In our area it was such a disaster it qualified for federal aid (they picked up your chainsaw cuttings from all the downed wood for free). My wife’s grandfather and grandmother were out of electricity for 3 weeks. People were desperate for portable generators because of power outages. People were willing to pay inflated prices for generators. There was an emergency shipment of generators to KC at the time, but most of them didn’t work for some reason, which contributed to the panic for generators.
We did have a bad frost last spring. It’s hard to say how it affected our production. Certainly many trees were blank, or nearly so, but because many trees had a light crop load, the fruit was huge over all. Some of the biggest fruit we’ve ever sold. So the trees make up some ground from producing larger fruit. In spite of the thin crop, there were still trees so heavy loaded, they were breaking scaffolds Overall, it certainly did reduce production, my guess now is that it probably cut the crop in half.
Once in three or four years sounds pretty severe.
I’ve looked pretty hard at the numbers of reliability of peach crops here. Basically, from growers with a lot of experience and from published data from Missouri State University, one could expect a complete crop loss about 30% of the time.
However, I’ve harvested peaches for about a decade and the last complete loss event for me was in 2007. I’m sort of thinking because I’m directly south of KC, it may be enough directly south in a leeward fashion, it somewhat tempers the cold patterns from blowing in from the north of KC. That is, the city tempers the bitter cold air (most of the time) although sometimes the cold air blows in from the east and circumvents the city.
I really don’t know for sure, but the patterns for the last 15 years are warmer and more mild than the 20 years prior to that.
That said, I’m really hugely concerned about an occasional complete crop loss. I have crop insurance, but in spite of that a complete crop loss would be a really bad deal. But my biggest worry is some winter cold event which would kill my peach plantings. These type of extreme cold weather events happened multiple times in the 80s here.
The replacement cost from the death of peach trees isn’t a big part of the expense. It’s that one has to replant and wait for the new trees to come into production without any revenue whatsoever, all the time expending labor and costs to take care of the new trees. Quite frankly, that’s disastrous.
You said that you’ve been growing peaches for about 10 years, and how it’s been relatively warm for that period. I was in KC at school in the early 80s, and the winter of 83-84 was the worst I ever experienced. It didn’t get above freezing for a month, and the snow never melted. I hated that cold so much that when I applied for jobs I put in for three areas- Texas, Arizona and California. I wasn’t gonna freeze again! I got a job in North Texas, and stayed there almost 30 years. But, now I’m back in the northern hinterlands, sort of…
Well, the late freeze probably contributed to your world-record peach, so it wasn’t all bad! But, I’m sure you’d rather have more product to sell in the long run. Have you capitalized on your big peach? Have you made a sign for your orchard declaring your feat?
Regarding losing peach trees, I talked to the owner of Reed Valley orchard, where we got all of our apples this year, and she said the winter in early 2015 was so severe it took out quite a few of their peaches, they had to do some replanting because of it. It got down close to -20 that winter. Plus, last season, they didn’t even have any peaches to sell because of the late freeze.
But, their 2000+ apple trees did really well, in addition to their berry patches. I don’t know how they (or you) do it, I know they have help, but man, that’s a lot of fruit to tend to.
It was 10 years ago this year that we had our crippling ice storm here. I dont wish anyone to have to deal with that. We were at least 2 weeks without normal power. A small generator ran our essentials for the first 3-4 days. I hope we dodge this one and you guys dont get hammered to bad to the south. Sending my daughter back to KSU tomorrow to beat the storm. Hate to miss out on a few more days with her, but she cant miss the start of classes on Tuesday.
Not that it’s all that important in the big scheme of things, but was wondering how this storm will affect the Chiefs’ playoff game.
Yeah, I think that’s when it hit my Mom’s house near the Tulsa area. A tree limb fell on their power line going to the house, and ripped the junction box right off of the wall. They were without power for about a week.
Actually, I’m still in the middle of verification from Guinness World Records. It’s been a learning process for sure. But the short of it is that one has to fill out all the paper work and wait three months to find out if the application has been accepted. Then, once the application has been accepted, it takes another 3 months for Guinness World Records to examine the evidence submitted to determine if it meets the criteria for an actual world record. Needless to say, there is tons of paperwork (i.e. verifying impartial judges, scales, etc.) I am still in this process and, who knows, Guinness may request more information which will slow the process down even more.
I never dreamed it was this involved. Heck, I’m thinking at this point maybe I should have shot-putted the giant peach and be done with it, lol.
-20F will ice most peach trees for sure. As you remember, in the 80s it got to about -20 degrees, with the all time record coldest temp here at -23F in 1989. I’m sure no peach trees survived that.
But most years the extreme low winter temps here are around -10ish. Actually most winter lows here are close to zero, so this year has already been a severe winter at -10F.
My reliance peaches have been in the ground since I was in my 20’s and I’m in my mid to upper 40’s. They have been reliable with a peach crop just like clockwork. I think I lost a crop one or two years. There are better peaches for flavor and in many other ways but they are a great overall peach for cold areas.
Good to hear, I just came in from covering my Reliance and Intrepid with plastic in preparation for tonights -15F. Hopefully the plastic and 2 500 watt work lights do the job. It was tough in 20 mph winds. If I’m lucky this will be the last cold night I have to protect them
Mike mine has lived through worse but they are older trees. Peaches come in to bearing by the 3rd year and produce a lot of fruit. All that said I can’t live with or beat canker in my area. The peaches that do the best are ones I leave a lone and spray as needed. Some of them never get canker but it’s a mystery to me why.
Good to hear that track record Clark. That gives me confidence that at least some peaches have thrived here in the last 20 years!
I grew Reliance at one time,(and planted a Reliance on in my mother’s garden) and while it was a cold hardy backyard peach, it was deficient compared to other peaches in that window (like Redhaven).
Still those cold hardy peaches are pretty valuable in cold years!
I have gone to some substantial effort to obtain a peach called Wisconsin Balmer. It’s not offered by any nursery or grower at this time, but ripens in the “roughly” Redhaven window.
The woman I got the scioinwood from said W. Balmer is superior to Reliance in quality and sometimes sustains -20F temps and still fruits fully. She grows both Reliance and W. Balmer.
I budded a few trees last fall and plan to trial these trees to see how they do. If they look promising, I plan to offer scionwood to members here.
What kind of peach is Intrepid? Heard it was one of the more flavorful hardy peach varieties.
-15 tonight?? Would you happen to be close to Int’l Falls? It’s a balmy 60 with rain here tonight, it’s been very windy, rainy and warm here the last few days. Almost spring like weather here lately.
I’d like to know how it tastes. I am going back and forth between Intrepid and Contender as my later peach. Here is the NCSU website for their high-chill peaches. It looks like Intrepid is a week or 2 later than Contender. So a Reliance, Contender, Intrepid planting would give you peaches through late July to end of August, it would seem.
Bob, I can’t tell you firsthand because I haven’t successfully produced a single peach from it yet. Stark Brothers site says it is freestone.
My first year with it we had the polar vortex winter, several nights below -30. . . so. . .toast.
The second year it died back to the trunk over the winter, then grew back tremendously
Last year I was so close, buds were swelling, ready to pop, then we had a night that was forecast to be 22 which the flower buds could handle at that stage according to U of Michigans site. Unfortunately it dropped to 8 so the flower buds got zapped. . . but this is the year , I can feel it
No, just a little ways north of the Minneapolis St. Paul metropolitan area. Looks like it will warm up nicely after tonight. . . probably no 60’s for a couple months tho