Damage to Brushy Mountain apples, peaches and nectarines from freezing temperatures early on the morning of April 22 varied widely from orchard to orchard and in many cases within the same orchards.
Comments of growers indicate that overall about half or less of a full crop of apples will be harvested on the Brushies this year, but the Brushy Mountain peach and nectarine crop overall appears to have fared better.
“The peaches are looking better all the time and I think I’ll end up with a decent crop,” said Armit Tevepaugh of Vannoy Ridge Road in the Brushy Mountain community. He plans to start selling peaches and nectarines on July 1.
“The apples are kind of spotty. It depends on where the cold air lay. The cold is like water. It will run to the low places and pond up,” said Tevepaugh, adding that most of his surviving apples are in the upper portions of trees.
A spring freeze normally causes more damage to peaches and nectarines than to apples, but ordinarily it needs to get colder than it did in many orchards the morning of April 22 to significantly reduce the apple crop.
Low temperatures dropped to around 31 degrees at elevations from a little over 2,000 to about 2,500 feet above sea level early that morning. Significant damage normally wouldn’t occur that time of year unless temperatures dropped to the upper 20s.
“There is damage, but the main thing is that there are apples there and we are taking care of them,” said orchardist Ty Lowe of the Pores Knob community.
He said the extent of damage within an orchard depended more on locations of trees than on varieties, but contradictions in where damage occurred and the severity make it hard to generalize.
“It was a strange freeze and I don’t think like anything we’ve seen before,” said Lowe, adding that information he received from North Carolina State University indicates a correlation with relative humidity.
Orchardist Gray Faw of the Brushy Mountain community agreed about the variability within orchards based on location. In some of the same rows, he lost all of his fruit on some trees and will have to thin due to so much fruit remaining on others.
“There certainly are more apples and peaches than I thought” soon after the freeze hit, said Faw, adding that consumers can expect higher prices due to widespread freeze damage in North Carolina and neighboring states.
He said appearance of apples may suffer, but the type of crop insurance he has for apples covers losses due to the fruit not grading as well.
He noted that the cool and dry weather has helped keep fruit tree diseases down, reducing the need to spray.
Faw said his grandfather, orchardist and preacher Jonah Parker of the Brushy Mountain community, said the Brushy Mountain apple crop has been completely wiped out by freezing temperatures twice – in 1959 and 1964.
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Orchards survive freeze with more fruit than many expected - Wilkes Journal Patriot
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