New trees arrived from the nursery on the first day of April and nothing more uplifting than tree planting. There’s a good feeling of being one with nature when we plant the new tree stock. Rainfall was plentiful just before the planting took place but overall conditions were conducive and now there are more trees added to the orchard. All the plantings were apple trees. Experimenting with a few new varieties at the request of some of our customers and also planted some “tried and true” varieties. Some stock replaced trees that died due to disease and some were replacements for varieties that did not meet our expectations for our customers.
There will be no peaches in the orchard this season. The winter cold devastated the fruit bud and there has not been one bloom in the orchard. Sad when we look over and what was a burst of beautiful pink blossoms last year is now trees waiting to leaf out. Ten degrees below zero is about the lowest temperature that our peach root stock can withstand and still have fruit bud. This year we registered twenty to twenty-five degrees below zero for an extended period of time. Just too cold! It was Richard Hayden of Purdue University that warned for every degree below minus 10 degrees a grower could expect a 10% reduction in crop production. His warning was quite accurate this year as all fruit bud was destroyed in the prolonged cold temperatures of this past winter.
Tho weeks ago, we suffered another winter blast and had frost, freeze and nineteen degrees two nights. Undoubtedly, there will also be some damage to the apples. Although, more hardy than peaches, apples do not withstand that dip in temperatures without some adverse affects. As we approach bloom we will have a more accurate appraisal of damages in the apples.