Insight of the Week: Frosted Blossoms

What a beautiful and warm March we had! The birds sang, the flowers bloomed, and the fruit trees became confused. 

One of the major reasons for not getting fruit from your Apples, Peaches, Cherries and other fruit trees is erratic spring temperatures. 

On sunny Friday, I was working in one of my client's gardens and saw a beautiful but unfortunate sight:

This peach tree is in the "First Bloom" stage of its lifecycle. In this stage the earliest of the blooms on the tree open to be pollinated. 

On Saturday it snowed. 

Fruit trees have different temperature tolerances for each stage in their lifecycle. At first bloom, for this peach as an example: A temperature of 26 degrees will kill 10 percent of the blooms; a temperature of 21 degrees will kill 90 percent. 

Fruit trees require a specific number of hours of chilling before they will blossom. A peach tree requires around 800 hours with the temperature below 45, which we achieved by February. If the temperature had remained cold the tree would still believe that it is winter, but when the temperature climbed into the 60's in March this peach tree was ready to grow. It swelled and burst its buds, it shot out small leaves, and then bloomed. 

Young Peach Tree in "First Bloom" Stage Hours Before Snow Storm

This all happened too early in our season for our climate. Trees benefit from the temperatures slowly warming from winter into spring. 

The good news for this customer is that the tree had only been planted last year and would not have produced fruit this year any way. The bad news however is that had this tree been older, we would have had to wait until next year's blooms. 


And now you know! 

Happy Farming, 
Woody