You know if your plant starts saying, “Feed me, Seymour,” you’re in trouble.
I can volunteer myself as genetic material to create “warm blooded” tree. I want to hibernate in winter anyway.
Good link, I added it to the “General Fruit Reference” thread.
Looks like we do this all over again a week from now…newest Euro run shows some ugly stuff…just keeps rotating through…round after round.
Just so you can compare…this is tomorrow
this is a week from today
The idea is to trap heat that rises from the ground.
2F here in southern ME, ~10mi from the coast. Trees still look pretty much asleep though.
My weather station got down to 19F this morning:
https://www.wunderground.com/personal-weather-station/dashboard?ID=KMDBALTI116#history
Pull up a chair early tomorrow morning and watch my apricots and plums fry in real-time
Still dormant here. I feel so bad for you guys. At least you don’t have to depend on your trees for your living and can still go buy fruit at the store. Just imagine how it was for the pioneers when they would lose their fruit. Even the wild stuff probably had off years. Count your blessings!
We are slated for 3 degrees tonight. As mentioned in my recent topic, I’m trying to figure out what this is likely to do to every species I grow here for fruit.
That might hit open flowers pretty hard…
Should have a streaming ip camera out there so we can watch you set the orchard on fire with your blowtorch
I got a low of 19F here last night on my wstation and they’re forecasting a low of 9F tonight. I’m in the same boat with Bob V. having A. plums, Pluots and Apricots all being in swollen bud mode. Everybody else here is still pretty tight and fast asleep still.
It got down to 19 here last week and it made my cherry bush blooms the color of toast literally.
My outside thermostat recorded a low of 6.2F last night, which was a couple degrees lower than the forecast (which itself dropped several degrees over the last day or two). I had another thermostat next to it, which wasn’t transmitting, but I checked it manually during the night once which read a degree warmer, so maybe we only got down to 7F.
I bet this thinned some things a bit, but I don’t think it wiped anything out. I’m more worried about this happening a few more times, later in the spring.
We are all looking at the buds to see if they break dormancy… The problem is, they do not have to have visible signs of it to be in trouble in this weather. Last year buds on my peach and apricots were looking dormant, till mid of April, when they start to just fell off the trees. Same dormant look this year. I guess dormancy doesn’t break overnight, it starts slow, invisible to our eyes. And buds could be affected by weather much earlier than we expect it.
I’ve had buds blossom, but the flowers didn’t look healthy and vibrant as usual. I wasn’t surprised when they didn’t produce any fruitlets.
After what last spring was like here, I feel the same way at this point. Last spring I had a couple hundred blooms on Redhaven after all the frosts had past and just about all of them aborted in the June drop. Surprised that I have some Flavor Heart and Hesse flower buds on the trees this year since I just planted them last spring. I’m not holding my breath here after last year.
Last night it got down to 10F here, but what’s 3 or 4 degrees among friends? All I want to know is who is steering and who is rowing the boat? Btw…I think the boat just sprung a small leak and am looking for volunteers to bail out the water! Does anyone have some chewing gum so we can plug the leak?
This probably won’t make any Northeastern people any more happier,but someone told me the other day,that December-February was the coldest the Seattle area(maybe PNW?)had in 32 years.
We stayed cold and didn’t get the extreme warming first,so most of my fruit should be okay.
The cold did take all the leaves off the Feijoa plants,hopefully they will grow back. Brady
If we had a “normal” or cold winter up to this point, we wouldn’t be talking about last nights (and now tonight’s) lows. I’ve seen lows here near zero in mid-march cause no damage because winter preceding was cold. The fruit trees are 2-3 weeks ahead of schedule due to insanely warm temps preceding- really CA weather.
It was the night before the April Fools joke of 17 degrees when plums were in full bloom when I discovered my peach blossoms had already been toasted by about -12 in mid-Feb (the Valentines day bud massacre). I’m sure that’s also when apricots were destroyed if the later freeze didn’t kill them.
That is true, but the buds were clearly swollen more than they should have been. That is why they were susceptible to the negative temps.