Early Spring, Hard Freeze, Fruit??

We don’t know yet how this week's freeze will affect the fruit harvest this year. The color of trees in bloom is still intact, but you know there will be consequences when the temperature has dropped into the low 20’s. Even if climate change gives us warmth in the early spring, when the weather turns those arctic winds still blow straight down on us, with too little time and distance to warm them up along the way.

A couple years ago I was selecting fruit trees for our orchard, and I ran across a paper on frost sensitivity. What I remember is that the risk of losing the harvest depends on how far along the flowers are, but that different varieties within a species may be more or less sensitive to freezing even with flowers at the same stage of development.  The most sensitive time occurs as the buds are opening, before they’ve been pollinated. If the stigma or the style freezes, there’s no way for pollen to unite with egg, and no fruit develops. I inferred from this that the ovary is more hardy (or better protected) than the rest of the pistil, so if the time for fertilization has come and gone, the harvest is more likely to come through.

The plums have been in full bloom, and humming with bees, for the past week. Any fertilization that was going to happen with those is already done. But the pears and apricots were just starting to open, and the cherry buds are swelling but still closed. The juneberries in the woods are in bloom, but the one in our front yard is at the same stage as the cherries. Apples are more cautious, being longer acquainted with our fickle northern weather. So if my memory is correct, it seems the pears and apricots are most at risk.

My roommate Rhonda grew up in a household where food storage was a way of life. When they had a boom year for peaches a few years ago, her mom processed non-stop for the entire season, putting away as much fruit as humanly possible. She didn’t ask, “How much is a year’s supply?” but rather, “How much time can I squeeze out of my day?”

Rhonda said at the time she thought her mom was nuts, putting away so much more than they could possibly eat before the next year's harvest. But the crop has failed three years in a row since then, and her mom still has peaches to eat.

Me, I just finished the last of the dried pears a couple days ago. I may try that strategy some day, but if I lose this year’s harvest, I’ll be doing without next winter.

Life changes in certain predictable ways when you switch back to a local/regional food supply, and this is one of them. A local diet reveals your dependence on the weather, and the climate, and the seasons, and the planet itself, in a much more intimate way. Weather rarely wipes out every region where a particular food is grown, all in the same year, but it can easily wipe out your region's harvest. For the people at the top of the global food chain – Americans, that is, with our ability to out-bid the rest of the world in the global marketplace – food shortages appear (for now) to be a thing of the past. But for people who are lower down the chain, and people who eat locally, and people who depend on the harvest for their income, a regional crop failure can be a disaster. This is especially true if the region is specialized to grow a single crop for a global marketplace, instead of a variety of different foods for local or regional consumption. 

Diversity is crucial, if you want your region (or even your home garden) to produce reliably. One of the things I've discovered in my garden is that, every year, at least one crop fails, and at least one crop does really well. So if I grow many different crops, the character of my diet may change from year to year, but I always have enough. So far, that's been my response to the unpredictability of the weather.