The annual countdown to fresh, sweet, rosy peaches is on. But
how much of the Georgia
peach crop survived last month’s deep freeze?
"When you look at a crop that produces 10 times the
number of flowers it can set
fruit for, you never know," said Mark Collier, Peach County
director of the
University of Georgia Extension Service.
"We won’t know everything for a good long time,"
Collier said.
Cold weather is required to precondition peaches. But this
year, February temperatures
hit 8 degrees in the middle Georgia peach belt after a warm
spell had led many peach
varieties to bloom.
"In some cases the weather was a hindrance to the crop,
but in others it
wasn’t," Collier said. "Because different varieties
bloom at different times and
in different places, it’s hard to assess the damage to the
entire crop."
In Brooks County, on the Georgia-Florida line, the news is
about the same.
County Extension Director Johnny Widdon said one small
orchard in the county suffered
serious damage, losing 75-80 percent of their crop.
"Florida Kings and Florida Dawn varieties are the
earliest varieties we grow here.
They got hit pretty hard," Widdon said. "We need to
give it a little time to let
the damaged blooms fall off and see what comes out."
Blooms that are just swelling when a freeze covers an orchard
can suffer damage inside
the bud that won’t show for several days.
"We have some of the blooms that are just opening and
others are full open,"
Widdon said. "You have to wait for it to open to really
assess the damage.
"You also have to consider that cold weather could kill
many of these early
flowers and we could still have a full peach crop," Collier
said, "because peach
trees produce so many more flowers than are needed for the
fruit."
Collier said the extent of cold damage depends on many
factors, including temperature,
wind or the stage of flowering or fruiting.
"It even depends whether the trees are at the top or the
bottom of the hill,"
he said.
Some varieties may suffer losses in quantity or quality due
to the recent freeze. But
Collier said Georgia peaches aren’t out of danger yet.
"Peaches are pretty susceptible to cold damage,"
Collier said. "We are
more worried about what kind of weather is yet to come than the
damage we have had so far.
"When it’s not yet Easter and the peach trees are
blooming, we get a little
nervous," he said. "We haven’t reached our last frost
date yet."
The last normal frost date for Peach County, the state’s
largest peach-producing county
with a $25 million crop, is between March 15 and March 20.
Peaches are big business in Brooks County, too. It’s the
state’s second-largest
peach-growing county.
"Now that we will have small peaches coming, the cold
weather could do more
damage," Widdon said. Georgia ranks third in the nation in
peach production behind
South Carolina and California. But it’s still the Peach
State.
And in middle Georgia, where more than 80 percent of the
state’s peach crop is grown,
they’re just waiting for Easter.
"Nobody feels like the peaches are out of danger until
after Easter," Collier
said.
