like much of the mid-west, we had a warm spell and now getting ready for 20 F tonight.
It looks like last weeks 25 F lows stopped bud development so just a few buds are showing red/pink. But the odd part is most of the buds are very small, and not even swollen.
Is it normal to have peach buds just stop but some develop? We did get -7 F right before X-mass and maybe I’m looking at a lot of dead buds? The few that survived will likely get killed tonight at a long duration 20F?
I’ll cut a few and see what I have. Have you ever seen such a range in bud development?
For sure on the wind and tarps. I had the tarp half on and it was riding on tall-ish suckers I will cut off. But when I saw the tree rocking, I pulled it down!
I sure hope Olpea is pre-bloom, I think he is getting this same low temps.
In my experience, when buds stopped developing in in winter/early spring due to serious temperature swing, they often were dead. Hope it is not your situation.
When you want to call anyone attention, put @ in front of their handle names, like this @Olpea . Hope Mark will chime in.
I took a cutting of one of my peaches and put it in a vase to observe bloom quality. In this pic there are 3 dead buds and 3 that seem to be blooming. I’ve cut a few of the swelling buds open and everything seems to be green. That is consistent with what I see in my field. About 40-50% of my peach buds seem ok at this stage. Still some hurdles to come, though. I think it is common after a winter cold snap to have some peach buds make it and others get fried.
By dead Ovum you cut the bud in half and look for green or brown in the core. For peaches there would be a single ovum for a single seed.
Many plants will fully flower despite dead ovums.
We are in pre-bloom. Many of the trees are at green calyx. We got hammered with -9F back in Dec. Normally that wouldn’t be too much of a problem, but it came without much pre-cooling so I’m pretty sure the peach trees suffered.
The best thing to do is to put some shoots in a vase of water as ztom did. I haven’t done that so far this year. There are so many varieties, I don’t know which ones to test. I have trouble identifying dorman dead flower buds from live ones, by cutting them open. I think Tippy is right. When they stop developing, they are pretty much dead.
I spoke with a friend tonight who stays in touch with a lot of other commercial peach growers in the lower Midwest. I guess Oklahoma peach orchards got hammered, as well as orchards an hour or two north. They were in full bloom and got some wicked temps on those flowers.
So far, we are still in the game, but suffered some from the -9F in Dec. Things are still too advanced for the average here, so I suppose our turn of the cold miser to do his dastardly will come.
