Local apple and peach crops may have been damaged to some degree by a recent cold snap with temperatures in the teens and 20s, but it’s too early to know how much, the county’s extension agent said last week.
Ashley Hoppers, UGA Agriculture Extension agent for Gilmer and Fannin County, said apple growth isn’t as developed right now as it was last April, when a below-freezing cold snap hit.
Although it got colder earlier this month than it did in that 2021 freeze period, apples are still in the early stages of development, which was an advantage, Hoppers noted.
“I do expect we’ll have some level of damage because we’re moving out of dormancy,” she added. “These types of (freeze) events are expected and kind of unavoidable. We’ve been lucky this year in that the weather has been more normal. It’s March, and we’re kind of moving into that time of year where spring is trying to war with winter.”
The April 2021 freezing was devastating to several varieties of locally-grown apples, early and otherwise, Hoppers noted. Trees were in bloom and bearing fruit then. Most are still in the green tip stage now, she noted.
“That’s the tight rope we walk as we get closer to spring and April, which is really that dangerous month where we’re moving toward more and more susceptible stages of development,” Hoppers said.
“As we move from silver tip to green tip to tight cluster, then once you have flowers and reproductive tissue, those cold temperature stakes get a lot higher. We were in green tip in Gilmer for the most part, but (it is) variety dependent. We were fortunate because we weren’t in full bloom like last April.”
Barry Pritchett, proprietor of Ellijay’s Red Apple Barn, said it didn’t take long to see how bad the freeze damage was last spring.
“I’ve learned through the years that it’s really hard to tell till after they’ve bloomed, and you’ve got fruit set. Last year, it wasn’t hard to tell after a 27-degree morning with the wind blowing at about 40 miles an hour,” he added. “You could go out the morning after the freeze and cut the little apples open, and they were black on the inside.”
Pritchett said, so far, his apple trees look good after the freeze earlier this month, but time will tell. His first apples to bloom usually include such popular varieties as Mutsu and Granny Smith.
“Most everything is still closed up pretty tight in the bud, so I think, right now, everything should be OK,” said Pritchett. “When the fruit has had cold weather as it’s going through its cycle of coming out to bloom, it seems to withstand more cold. We’ve kind of had that this spring, but I’d rather have it 23 (degrees) a week ago than 23 in the middle of April.”
Peach crops may be a little worse off this year since they are farther along, Hoppers noted.
“With peaches, I imagine there will be some damage, but they do put on more flowers than are needed for a full crop,” she added.
Several factors contribute to how badly a freeze can damage tree fruit crops, Hoppers noted. Factors might include whether trees are planted up high or down low, humidity levels and even the type of freeze that occurs.
“This was a particularly powerful advective freeze (earlier this month), which makes it difficult to do any kind of frost protection,” Hoppers said. “With a radiational freeze, there’s going to be that warm air layer so you can do a temperature inversion using wind machines and things like that to turn that layer over and give yourself a few degrees of warmth. With an advective freeze, it’s preceded with powerful winds, and it gets very cold. That’s what the situation was here and what made it difficult to protect against.”
As for row crops, Hoppers said it’s still early enough to where most have probably not been planted yet, and growth that may have started isn’t likely to be damaged.
“The soil temperature is not necessarily right where it needs to be, so (most) people are probably still holding off on planting. I’m not terribly worried about those crops at this point. If it was at the end of the month or in April, that might be different,” she added.
Hoppers said she’ll be visiting local apple orchards this week to get a closer look and determine the damage extent of the recent freeze.
“We’re kind of still in that wait and see window right now,” she added. “We’re probably not going to know for another week. Damage will be a little more obvious at that point. I’ve talked to a few of our producers, and they’ve said the same thing — it’s just too early to tell.”