Frozen Blooms

Plum blossoms "first bloom" stage


Peach blossoms "first bloom" stage


Apple buds "tight cluster" stage


Tart cherry buds "first white" stage

Will we lose all the fruit in our orchard and the region tonight?
Well, we knew we might be in trouble when we had day upon day of 70-80 degree temperatures in mid-March. Now we have fruit trees in various stages of bloom and a frigid cold front that swept through the region last night.

Compare the above photos taken today in our orchard with the chart at:
http://extension.usu.edu/files/publications/factsheet/pub__5191779.pdf
The low tonight in our area is expected to be 20 degrees.

Our young, little orchard is still just starting to bear fruit and we are not really expecting much out of it yet this year. Maybe a bucket of cherries, a bushel or two of apples, and a few plums and peaches. But many of the orchards that we rely on for summer and fall fruit may be in danger. Apples seem like they'll probably be okay. But they all just depend on how far into blossom they are and this depends mostly on their individual microclimates around the trees. I am certainly no fruit expert so it will be interesting to see how much loss there is.


Ginger (the brownish pieces on the left) and galangal (the larger yellowish pieces with rings on the right)
Galangal is thai ginger. Some customers have seen our young ginger on our market stand and asked, "Is that galangal?" We responded, "What's galangal?"
Its also known as Thai ginger. And we've never tried it before, but we figured we should. So we purchased five pounds of seed pieces to give it a try. And the 5 lbs. of galangal and 50 lbs. of ginger arrived in the mail last week and planted them in potting soil in bulb crates immediately. They will be in the bulb crates until early May. Then once the seed pieces have green buds on them we will transplant them into the ground.