From: "William C. Garthright" <billg@inebraska.com>
To: North American Fruit Explorers <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: Re: [NAFEX] Frost and fruit
Date: Wed, 21 Apr 2010 19:31:18 -0500
It looked like we might actually have a bumper crop this year. Even
the Pluot tree bloomed completely for the first time ever!
My pluots were just a mass of blossoms, too. All three of them. (You
just have one tree? Don't they need cross-pollination then?)
I'm a little worried that I haven't seen many bees around, though. (I
think my leaf-cutter bees might have died over the winter, and I still
haven't been able to get a population of blue orchard bees started.) It
stayed cold for a long time this year, and then it suddenly warmed up a
bunch - and stayed very warm.
On the bright side, I might actually get apricots this year. But pretty
much every fruit tree I've got started blooming at the same time. It's
really something. And the city has been planting those flowering
non-fruiting pears (I think that's what they are) everywhere, and
they're all blooming, too. With everything blooming at once, I'm worried
that there won't be enough bees to go around. I certainly haven't seen
very many.
Well, we'll see, I guess.
Then, of course, we had two nights with frost. Temps around 32 degrees.
Last year, the temperature dropped to 23 degrees here one night in early
April (that was at the airport a few miles from here, so it was probably
slightly warmer here). I had apricots, pluots, and plums blooming at the
time.
It killed every single apricot blossom, but it didn't seem to faze the
pluots or the plums at all. Of course, there might be some variation
with different varieties of pluot, but I'm sure 32 degrees wouldn't
bother them.