Dogwood winter aftermath
Less than a week after the hard freeze,
I'm able to start assessing what got nipped. The bad news is that
the strawberries were harder hit than the numbers suggested --- lots of
flowers are opening and most have black centers, meaning they aren't
going to turn into fruits. On the other hand, the first undamaged
flowers are also starting to open, which means we only lost about the
first four of five days worth of strawberry fruits.
The
apples are also starting to open flowers that were tightly closed last
week. Most are clearly damaged, with brown stamens, but a few look
okay like the one above. The big question will be whether the
female parts of the flowers survived --- it doesn't take all that much
pollen to fertilize every tree, but if the ovaries are damaged, there
won't be any fruit.
I was also heartened to
see that a few of the hardy kiwi buds were slowpokes and missed the
freeze. Maybe we'll still get a chance to taste homegrown kiwis
this year?
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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