by Tim Baker, NW Region Horticulture Specialist, University of Missouri Extension
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“And what to my wondering eyes should appear
But apples! On trees! Twas a sight for good cheer!"
There’s no doubt that the April freeze of 2007 will be long remembered as a disaster for Missouri fruit growers. After a post-freeze survey by horticulturists and orchard owners, everyone was pretty certain that the crop was heavily damaged, if not entirely lost. And current reports are dismal – a total loss of the peach crop, and substantial losses in the apple crop. Most orchards have very few apples to harvest.
Last week, I was visiting homeowners and produce growers in Grundy County, and stopped at a commercial orchard to see how things were going. I was surprised to see lots of apples on their trees.
This orchard was indeed fortunate. Very few apple orchards around Missouri are reporting any apples at all. Dr. Michele Warmund, our Extension fruit specialist, says that a good estimate for the Missouri apple crop would be a 10% survival rate at best.
Of course, individual orchards might report better results. Generally, the further north the orchard is located, the better the crop. This is because the fruit buds were not as far along at the time of the freeze, and were a bit more hardy, compared to orchards further south that were in full bloom or even post-bloom.
The site where an orchard is located can help avoid freeze injury in some cases, although with this freeze, the temperatures were so low that site selection usually didn’t help much. A few orchards did escape total losses, such as the orchard in Grundy County.
Individual trees in the same orchard can vary as well. Patrick Byers, of the Missouri State Fruit Experiment Station in Mountain Grove, says that he has seen as much as 30% of a crop on a few trees at the station, but many other trees at the station are completely bare.
Other fruit crops fared just as poorly. Dr. Warmund said that the peach crop was a total loss everywhere in Missouri. I certainly don’t know of any peaches that survived in our area. Blueberries fared poorly across the state with an estimated 5% survival rate. Blackberries, raspberries, and strawberries were heavily damaged around Missouri, although I think they did better in our area compared to further south. Grapes and pecans were also heavily hit by the freeze.
So what will the crop be like next year? It should be good, unless we have another disastrous freeze event. When fruit trees or other fruit-producing woody plants have a light year, they put a lot of energy into making fruit buds for the following year. So barring any catastrophes, we should have a bountiful harvest next year.
In my next column, I will go into a little more detail on how freeze damage affects future fruit production, and what implications this has when pruning your fruit trees.
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