2004-03-25 - 7:48 a.m.
We had a freeze here a couple of days ago. This time of year a freeze can do a lot of damage. The peaches,pears and blueberries are blooming and a freeze can kill the blooms causing a crop failure. I generally wait a couple of days before I go around and see how bad the damage is. Lots of times the bloom will look all right but the female part of the flower will be dead meaning no fruit from that bloom. You have to tear apart the bloom and check out the Pistil and see if is black and dead. To tell the amount of damage I take a sort of survey. I'll go along randomly picking 100 blooms. Then I'll make 2 piles, one of good blooms and the other of dead ones. When I'm done I'll count up the dead blooms to get a percent of damage. On most things if the damage is 50% or less it will be all right, above 50% and it starts to hurt.
One of the reasons I chose the blackberry variety I grow is because of late freezes. I used to grow some varieties that ripened in June but they would bloom around the first of April and every few years I would loose a crop. The variety I grow now ripens in July and dosen't bloom till the end of April so I have never lost a crop of them. The worst freezes are in April. By that time I'm lible to have something up in the garden and if a freeze kills it I have to replant. Deciding when to transplant the tomatoes into the garden is one of the toughest decisions of the year. If we put them out too early and loose them to a freeze it can take a month to grow out new plants but the earlier we get them planted the sooner we have tomatoes for sale. The transplants start getting too big for the cups we put them in too, so you can't wait too long. The worst time we ever had was when we put out the transplants and a few days later an unexpected freeze came. We went and took the little plants out of the ground, repotted them, then replanted them after a few days. I sure don't want to do that again.
