The staff at Highmoor Farm in Monmouth knew early last winter this summer’s peach crop in the state was going to be a bust.
Temperatures that fell far below freezing were just too cold for the dormant buds to survive.
That means no peaches this year. In a double blow, while a second frost in May did not wipe out this year’s apple crop, experts say the overall yield is going to be down from last year because of it.
“Last February we sat around and watched the temperature drop,” Renae Moran, professor of pomology and fruit tree specialist with University of Maine Cooperative Extension, said. “We recorded minus-17-degrees on Feb. 5, and we knew it was cold enough to kill the [peach] flower buds.”
That kind of cold is not unheard of in Maine and explains why peaches are a relatively new crop in the state. There are currently only 25 acres of commercial peach orchards here, Moran said. Small groves or individual peach trees can also be found on homesteads around the state.
They all suffered from the February freeze.
“We lose the peach crop every four to five years,” Moran said. “The fact we even have a peach crop is new to Maine.”
In a sign of how winters have been warming in the region, when peaches were first planted commercially in the state, crop loss due to extreme colds were every three out of five years, Moran said.
Things are looking better for the apples growing on the roughly 2,000 acres of commercial orchards in the state, but they did not escape the heavy spring frost, Moran said.
“It’s going to be a short crop of apples this year,” she said. “May really hurt some of the orchards.”
Orchards that are set to have apples this fall are the ones that are growing at higher elevations, Moran said. They should be ready by mid-September, and she predicts they will get picked pretty quickly.
“When you plant at those higher elevations, the cold air ‘drains’ away during those wee small hours of the morning,” she said. “The warm air rises and you get that temperature inversion.”
That’s why more killing frosts hit low-lying areas of valleys around the state.
“You will notice a lot of the old orchards are on tops of hills where the soil is poor,” Moran said. “Those old farmers knew the air drainage would protect their crops from late season freezes.”