The Mountain Eagle
WHITESBURG WEATHER

Most recent freeze means there won’t be fruit on trees for the 8th straight season

Points East


I can tell you for sure that the climate on Charlie Brown Road took a drastic change for the worse during the spring of 2014 and has yet to show any signs that it is going to change back.

It wasn’t warming that did my little orchard in, however. It was April hard freezes. Last Friday night, one got me again. This makes eight years in a row that there will be no homegrown peaches, pears, apples, cherries or currants in our back yard.

The jury is still out on Loretta’s blueberries. What few she saved last year were probably worth a dollar each if you value her labor at a dollar an hour. Everything else is already history.The pretty pink and/or white blossoms on the other fruit are still pretty but they froze before they’d had a chance to even think about setting fruit.

Andy was here on Sunday and he said the honeybees were working them like crazy but I’m betting they will all be jet black by the time you read this.The temperature, out there, got down to 24. A frost at 34 is usually all it takes. We’ll see, but I don’t expect a single ripe fruit.

When we bought this place in 1998, the first thing on my to-do list was start a small orchard. I’d been growing a vegetable garden for several decades, but never started any fruit trees because it takes a lot of money and time to get them productive on rental property. We’d had apple trees at a couple or three other places we’d rented but they were there long before.

I wound up buying about a dozen, “semi-dwarf” trees from Lowe’s that were already four years old, more than six feet tall and had half-bushel size root balls. I paid upwards of $50 each for them and hired our son and one of his high school buddies to dig washtub size holes in which to plant them. I wound up with over $1,500 invested in the project and that does not include over 100 hours of my own time.

Three of the peach trees took off and in the second year began producing the largest, free-stone peaches I’d ever seen grow. I’ve forgotten the variety names, but the peach fruit was so heavy that by 2005 it began breaking the limbs on the trees.

The peaches were also the best I’ve ever tasted except for the fact that they attracted every wasp, yellowjacket, bumblebee, hornet, Japanese beetle, and numerous other bugs that can’t be fought with insecticides that close to ripening. If you want to lose all your taste for peaches, bite down on a mouth full of bumblebee or yellow jacket and see how it’s still tasting, three days later. We found out, the hard way, that you have to be very, very careful and you’d better have a knife handy if you intend to consume homegrown peaches.

Anyway, the ice storm of 2009 essentially finished off the peach trees.There are a couple or three apple trees still out there, but they have never really recovered and late freezes have prevented them from bearing since 2014. Ditto for the cherries.

However, one pear tree seems to thrive in spite of the ice storm damage, and it is probably 40 feet or taller now and its canopy has completely covered space previously occupied by peaches, pears and at least one of its siblings. In both 2012 and 2013, it produced truckloads, more than a dozen bushels each year, of blocky, old-fashioned pears that we were hauling throughout 5 counties to give away. I kept them stored away in the basement both years and we would still be eating on them, fresh, in January.

Since 2013, there haven’t been more than a dozen pears in any given year and all of them were misshapen due to frost damage. Brother Andy still believes we may have a big crop in 2021. I’m not cleaning out any jars to make pear preserves even though I love them better than apple butter.

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