(for the record, Jersey has some of the best peaches in the country)
We had a warm spell for a couple of weeks in April, which caused all the peach, cherry, and even apple trees to flower. Then we had a massive freeze, which killed all the blooms. This orchard is about ten miles from me and at which I’ve gone peach picking. Another large orchard only four miles from me is in the same situation. We have a small peach tree on our property, and it has maybe 15-20 small fruit, which means we’ll likely get a couple peaches, at best. Almost nothing on our old plum tree.
I hate that for the farmers and backyard growers. We had something similar happen. We had a peach tree loaded with blooms and small peaches and then it froze. I covered it with a frost cloth and put some lights in the tree but it didn’t help much. I think that 8 survived, and a racoon got half of those.
However, we had another peach tree that bloomed after the freeze and it is absolutely loaded. I had to prop up the limbs because they were sagging so much. We just had two with dinner.
Not only that, the weird blizzard/ice storm snapped a lot of trees; our plum tree lost about a quarter of its main branches smaller than 4" thick
Ironically - or maybe it’s just nature’s way? - where we had to cut back the tree allowed more sunshine to our rose bushes, so they’re thriving right now
Our blueberry bushes in the back yard look a little thin, too, but our raspberries (in the front, with the roses) are fine
We’re not too far north of you and the same thing happened to the orchards up here. Our local one is about 5 min away and they were making posts to all local residents apologizing because they had helicopter pilots going all night for a few nights to try and keep the warmer air down by the crops. They set out orchard heaters as well and I know it helped a bit but the last thing I read said they still lost a significant percentage of their crop. Its a shame.
You don’t know how many times I’ve explained to D’Wife “it’s not that the birds are eating the berries; there weren’t that many berries to begin with. No flowers, no berries.”
“It’s because the bees are dying”
“It’s because there were no flowers for the bees to pollinate. There were enough bees. I’d sit in the porch and watch them. They couldn’t find any flowers”
I’ve got those same bags over some of my apples and figs. Stinking racoon figured out how to squeeze peaches to get the pulp and juice out of them without tearing the bag.
Animals are very good at finding food. Crows would peck our apples. Just one or two pecks, ruining the entire apple. They’d leave the rest on the tree to rot in the sun.
Deer this morning (I suspect) got to that peach and knocked it off into the fence around the tree. Ate about half of it (through the f***ing bag). We had the other half, and although a couple of days before being fully ripe, it was a peach. One left that I brought in.
I don’t know how big the tree is, but I put this around my tree after the critters took half of the ones that I had put the bags on. It is pretty large and will cover the tree for several more years It reached the ground, so I put some weights on it to keep the animals out. We didn’t lose a single peach once to critters once I put it on.
Correction. I put this on tree #2 that bloomed later than tree #1 where they stole the peaches from the bags.
