In the13-14 years I’ve been growing fruit, I’ve never had so much damage, and I really don’t understand why. Wondering if others, especially here in the southeast (I’m TN/KY area) are seeing similar.
When I say damage, I mean severe damage- not just the loss of fruit buds. For the first time EVER it looks like some of my figs not only froze to the ground (that happens every few years) but were outright killed. About half of my peach trees have massive amounts of dead wood…they’ve been leafed out over a month now so its easy to spot all the big limbs that have no growth at all. It is so bad here that all the shubs where I work got killed, and if you drive around my town you see dead shrubs, bushes, and trees EVERYWHERE.
With all this damage, you would think we had some kind of horrifying winter, but we really didn’t! We had exactly 2 days that were right around -5 to -6 degrees back in January. That isn’t even record breaking temps for us (though very rare) and I know many of you see temps WAY below that. Aside from those 2 days, I don’t think we got below 8 degrees any other day and very rarely got below 15, Also, its not like those two -5 or -6 days happened before or after trees went to sleep or woke up! January is pretty much the dead of winter for us, so you’d think that would be the safest time to hit low temps. Those days also weren’t preceded by warm days. In other words, none of the things I would expect to cause such severe damage seemed to have happened. I’m even wondering if it was freeze or if some new insect or disease or something caused all this…but considering it involves so many different species of plants that seems doubtful.
I just don’t know. I’ve been meaning to bring this up for a month and ask if anyone else is seeing an unusually high number of woody plant deaths this spring, and if so why, and if not what happened here? Doubtful anyone knows, but I’m so curious that I had to report this and ask about it! Thanks.