I think a lot of it has to do with how much our temperatures can swing compared to other growing regions. I have always read how hardiness increases as the temperature decreases slowly. If it starts to warm up then the trees start to lose hardiness. On Jan 3rd I was 66f, then on the 6th we bottomed out at -12f. On Feb 6th we had -15f, but it had been over a week since we saw 50's. I think the freeze in Jan probably hurt more than the one in feb. Most places don't get swings like that. The guys in WI might get -20f without seeing too much damage, but it was probably a couple of weeks of 0-10 highs before that, and after it for that matter. My reliance and redhaven (20 trees) are either froze out completely, or later and not swelling yet. I have one Q-1-8 that has bud swell now. I haven't checked at the orchard further north. There was still snow on the ground there yesterday, so I doubt they are doing anything there yet.

Fruit set report Apple: They are still in flower, but are very healthy looking this year. Two of my tree (Fuji and Gravenstein) are only 2 so I will not let any fruit set on them. Fiesta is flowering well, interestingly in some places where there were spurs last year there are no flowers. I do not think that it over produced last year, as I dropped all but 1 fruit per cluster and removed over half of the buds. Apricot: Lots of frost damage to young buds, and it is only a 2 year old tree, therefore, no flowers yet Peaches: My Frost Peach is loaded with fruit, in fact I thinned the fruit to one every 6 inches last night. I have it trained up to about 10 feet along the south wall of my house. The trunk is only about 2.5 feet and the fruiting wood starts there. Almost every blossom set fruit. Some of the nodes along the fruiting branches had fruit sets of 6-8 fruitlets the size of small marbles. I need to thin out some of the growth as well. I just planted a Veteran in February and I am going to remove any fruit that sets on it. Unfortunately, I do not think the nursery was very good about controlling leaf curl as it has some despite my application of copper before bud brake late in the dormant season. Pears: The Pears had tons of blossoms. My Flemish beauty seems to have set quite a few as well. The Anjou had fewer blossoms but it seems to have set a good amount of fruit as well. We will see how many drop naturally, in the past I have found that most do, as my trees are only 5 this year. Conference is new as of February, it has 1 flower cluster, but I will be removing any fruit that sets. Plum: Stanley plum has lots of fruitlets on the lower branches, and fewer on the upper branches. There are probably 4 to 5 pepper corn sized fruitlets per spur, I will drop fruit next month after natural drop occurs. My Green Gage is new this February. Persimmon: Just leafing out now. It dropped all its fruit last year when they were the size of a quarter. Hopefully that doesn't happen this year, but it is young too. Figs: Lots of embryos swelling on outer tips of the branches on both the Italian honey and brown turkey. Grapes vertical growth is only 2 inches now Citrus: Lisbon Lemon set many fruit last month, I have thinned them out a bit, and it continues to flower. The lime (I think it is a Tahitian) is producing some new flowers now. I put my citrus out two weeks ago, and of course a light frost hit them the first night. I sustained some damage, but I think they are tough enough to handle it. cheers Sam

I agree (how could you not) that it is not possible for an apricot to change to a peach branch so I will have to climb in there and get a better look. I can post pictures if needed. There is absolutely no question that the peaches are growing off of the "mini trunk" coming off of the main trunk from which the apricots grew, no doubt below the graft for the pluot. Perhaps there is a graft on that trunk for the apricot/peache tree. Interesting though, that we got a huge crop of pluots and peaches, but no apriots. Perhaps the broken branch two years ago was too much damage to recover and the peach section took over. thanks all for the input. Bill

"I've never heard of anyone using layering for this method but you must have been working in a pretty big scale to get that much heat from the chips." I was somewhat limited by the equipment I was using. Last summer I rented a Dingo to move mulch and make more mounds. While they are handy to move mulch, they are pretty slow digging, so I really didn't use near enough top soil (because it was slow to dig). However, I had built mounds the same way (layered mulch mounds) the summer before and gotten by with it with no problems. I constructed them by starting with a big mound of mulch (wood chips) on the bottom and then a couple alternating layers of soil and mulch after that. My thought was the layers of mulch would be thin enough they wouldn't compost, but I got the mulch too thick. Before I started using mulch mounds, I made mounds with just plain dirt and have never had any problems with 100% dirt. I agree I don't think mulch on the bottom with a generous amount of topsoil on top would have caused problems, as long as the roots were insulated from the mulch.