Frost Damage
Thursday, June 1, 2017 at 8:30PM
Velvet Snoutingdingle

At the beginning of May we woke to a hard frost. A month later, the toll is evident. The poor young mulberry was halted in its tracks. Its tiny leaves turned black. Now, new leaves are pushing from the base of each stem and new stems are growing, but all the original branches are struck dead almost to the main stem. What this means for the shape of the tree remains to be seen. The Old Laughing Lady has been cruelly used by the frost. Whole branches high up in the tree seem to have suffered the same fate as the mullbery, struck dead back to a thicker branch.  On other branches, thin leaves are breaking out to replace the ones that were lost. A young cherry has been hit in the same way. A new pear had half its leaves turn brown, so much so that we thought it had fireblight but now seems to be recovered. The burgeoning quince, with its ten thousand huge blooms, has set a single sad fruit. The medlar has lost every fruit. At the top of the garden, the odd multi-story quince and pear triple graft hybrid combo has just dropped it's quinces but the pears have survived. The hedge-plums have dropped all of their lower fruit. Which is strange. The grapes had hardly started and slept through the damage. But the apple trees? Not a bit of it. They are so thick with fruit that they look like grapes.

Article originally appeared on The Night Planted Orchard (https://www.nightorchard.org/).
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