Last night, my remote thermometer says it got down to 26° (actually it was this morning at 6:30 that was the coldest). I’m concerned about my cherry and nectarine blossoms. Mostly, it’s the cherries that concern me, because not many of the nectarine blossoms have opened yet. I’ll keep an eye on them, but I hope that’s the last of the serious sub-freezing temps now. The next week is supposed to be better than that, but still there are several nights around freezing in the prediction.
I found some info online that describes the temperatures that will produce 10% damage and 90% damage to various types of fruit blossoms. It says sweet cherries can experience 10% loss at 28° and 90% loss at 25°. Peaches (which I assume would probaby approximate the nectarine hardiness) are damaged at 26° (10% loss) and 21° (90% loss). So, I am worried about the cherries. I do think there are plenty of unopened cherry blossoms, though, and hopefully they’ll be enough if the open ones were nipped by this.
Well, the year turned out fine for fruit — except for our apples. We harvested a good amount of cherries, and the nectarines are ripe now. The flowering plum even produced its usual crop of small plums. But the apples didn’t even flower this year — it’s not the freezing that caused it, because they didn’t even produce flowers at all. I think it’s because I waited too long in summer 2007 to thin the fruit and they spent too much energy supporting all that fruit and didn’t produce next year’s flowers.