This February brought some abnormally warm weather for us and caused many of the plants in our orchard to break dormancy. The last frost date for our area is April 15th so anyone with an orchard or even just a few fruit trees may not get much sleep for the next month.
The orchard on campus has blueberries, pears, apples, a couple paw-paws, and 4 pecan trees that we planted earlier this year. Most of these plants have broken dormancy, but the blueberries have already sent out their flower clusters. Some of the flowers are still closed but some have begun opening slightly. At this stage (depending on the variety) these buds can tolerate temperatures from 24o to 27oF but some loss may still occur.
The NC State Extension for blueberries provides some information on how to combat late freezes:
- Prune smaller-diameter shoots because they bloom earlier than larger-diameter shoots
- Avoid cultivation (bushes can stay up to 2o warmer on uncultivated soils
- Keep the soil moist, more water in the soil = more heat absorption = more heat released.
- Irrigate with sprinklers. When water is sprayed on plants heat is produced from the process of freezing.
Another common way you could protect your plants is with frost covers but you would either need small plants or a lot of cover for that to be worthwhile. March in the southeast can always be unpredictable so other than these techniques, all we can really do is hope for mild weather!
Blueberry freeze damage and protection measures: NC State Extension. (n.d.).
https://content.ces.ncsu.edu/blueberry-freeze-damage-and-protection-measures
This week we also got a lot of planting done on the farm. Mikaela was the student farm manager and thanks to her, we transplanted kohlrabi, cauliflower, cabbage, broccoli, collards, kale, and fennel. This was probably the biggest planting day we have had on the farm so far this year. Not too much longer and we will have enough things growing to fill up some CSA boxes!
We also had Danielle and Anthony team up to install drip tape onto our newly planted beds and they did a great job.
The last task for the day was to put some frost cover over our strawberries which have all started to send out flowers. Strawberry flowers can start to take some damage at temperatures as low as 30 o so getting them covered before things get a bit cold early next week was essential.
– Randall Thomas
The Student Farm at CCCC 