An early morning scare faded quickly on Sunday morning with commercial growers all across Michigan’s Great Southwest breathing a collective sigh of relief when temperatures briefly punched below the freeze level, but then headed north again. Fortunately, Mark Longstroth, the colorful Michigan State University Extension Fruit Educator, says we likely sustained “very little damage” as a result of that brief foray down to around 30-degrees just before dawn.
Longstroth says it is clearly evident that tree fruits are blooming throughout the region, and they are running a good 10 to 14 days earlier than a normal growing season. That added to the fear factor when crystal clear skies ushered in the brief cold early Sunday.
Longstroth told me this morning, “The warm weather we’ve had has moved along fairly rapidly, and the nice thing is it stopped raining as much as it had been, so things are growing out, but we did get a little bit of a scare Sunday morning when temperatures dropped down to just below freezing, and in some of the coldest areas most open flowers can be hurt when temperatures reach 28 down to 25 degrees. That’s the critical temperature that we think of at bloom time, and generally no areas went down that low yesterday.”
Among strawberry crops, Longstroth says most of the flowers were still generally below the ground and they were able to withstand the freeze, “Because they can take the really cold temperatures along with the flower buds below the ground and not exposed.”
Longstroth says, “I don’t think the frost we had Sunday morning caused any damage. It might have hurt some people a little, but it didn’t hurt anybody very much at all.” He notes that the big freeze on March 14th was the one that many people were really worried about because of early bloom, however he notes, “That freeze caused a little damage to early apricots and very few other things.”
The early bloom schedule may well have most blossoms peaked before the arrival of the Blossomtime Grand Floral Parade coming on Saturday, May 6th, however, there will hopefully still be some blossoms this coming Sunday for the traditional Blessing of the Blossoms which launches the week-long Blossomtime Festival
