What might frost do to the little fruit on the fruit trees?

It has the potential to freeze them. After they freeze, they begin dropping off the fruit trees a few days later.

I had great fruitset on peach and plum trees in March. After numerous freezes, frosts, 5 rounds of hail (the latest was yesterday afternoon) and wind gusts in the 50s, two of my 4 trees have gradually lost all the fruit, one peach tree has 5 peaches left and one plum tree has about 10% of the fruit on it now that it had a month ago. I'll be surprised if I get any fruit at all this year from these trees, and certainly there won't be a bumper crop like last year.

How much any freeze or frost damages or kills your fruit is highly variable and would depend on how large the fruit are, what fruits and what varieties they are (some seem to tolerate frost or freeze damage a bit better than others), how long the freeze or frost conditions last, etc.). Unless your trees are very small (mine are huge), covering them up is impossible. If they are small, you can try covering them with floating row cover, tarps or sheets of plastic. To give them added warmth, some folks run Christmas lights through their trees and underneath the tarps, row cover or sheets of plastic. I have no idea if the lights produce enough heat to be of any real help. Any place that foliage touches the tarps or sheets, though, freeze or frost damage can occur.

There really isn't any way to protect fruit trees that is 'guaranteed' to work other than growing fruit trees in large containers and moving those containers into a well-insulated or heated building or greenhouse structure.

Dawn

jeff will just croak if our pears freeze, he LOVES our ancient old pear tree which is a trunk split with stumps of branches.when weather spares it we get a couple of hundred of amazing asian pears which are small prune size right now.he checks it nearly every day.i will give him this heads up but it does not sound good..............

Leava,

If y'all have time to put plastic sheeting or a tarp over the pear tree (assuming it is not too large) along with a heat source underneath the plastic sheeting or tarp (larger sizes of Christmas lights, a small heater plugged into an outdoor-type extension cord but in a spot where it can't start a fire, or 5-gallon buckets or trash cans full of water underneath the tree) you may be able to keep the fruit from being knocked off the tree.

However, since we have a cold air mass in place (Miraje, are you reading this? Am I correct about it being advective?) I think that means this is an advective frost (at least in my part of the state) and it is harder to protect fruit trees and other plants from advective frost than from radiational frost.

Dawn

The cold air advection is cooling things down today, but tonight winds should be nearly calm. It's still a cold air mass, but I think the frost mechanism will actually be more radiative in nature.

I'm tempted to cover some of my new shrubs in addition to my tomatoes. My chaste trees and wax myrtles clearly did not like the cold last time we had freezing temperatures. That was in mid-March, and the wax myrtles have just now started to recover. :(

We didn't get as cold this morning as they predicted. And one of the forecasts I follow that is usually more accurate than the NWS has raised their prediction to 35 for tonight and tomorrow morning. I will keep the cold frame covered. It got warmer than they were predicting today. After tonight it looks like maybe 40's and 50's for lows. I will start putting plants in the ground Wed. Jay

This afternoon while I was out playing in the mud in my garden and covering up all my plants, the NWS issued a Frost Advisory for part of NE OK. If you are in NE OK, you can see it at the Tulsa NWS office's webpage, linked below.

Heather, Thanks for the advective/radiational explanation. Radiational cooling always seems to give us either worse frost or at least more plant damage--and in the early years here, I wasn't good at figuring out it would happen. Now, I cover up stuff more often but the end result is less damage. I've discovered the floating row cover is my favorite garden helper.

With your new plants, I'd go ahead and cover them up if you have something to cover them up with. It wouldn't hurt the plants and might prevent another setback. I love my wax myrtles but I might have chosen something else if I'd realized how often they'd have cold damage, which is about every other year here in southern OK.

It was so cold out there in the garden with light rain falling on me and the wind blowing, no sunshine and I was ankle deep in wet clay that kept trying to suck my Crocs off my feet! It had better frost tonight or I'll be irritated that I spent all that time covering up plants for nothing. (Well, not really irritated because at least I can sleep well knowing the plants are covered.)

Jay, They're saying 36 for us, so I do expect some frost. Last night we only went 1 degree colder than forecast so maybe tonight we'll be similarly close to our forecast low. Your place often goes warmer than expected, but mine tends to go lower than expected. At least we both know what to expect.

I would like to resume planting by Wed., but we've had 2.7" of rain since the latest round began very early Sunday morning, so now I have water standing everywhere. I'm not complaining because we surely do need the moisture, but it does mean I won't be able to plant anything else for a while.

We'll probably be 85 or 90 in 4 or 5 days and then the mosquitoes will start hatching out. One thing about our weather is that it changes so quickly you don't get bored with it.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Tulsa Office of the NWS Webpage

thanx dawn, am passing your info to jeff.i came home a while ago from delivering food to sick friend and he was already making a tarp cocoon around the cattle panels i bought for trellis that i have not used yet,all this enclosing the tree.his plan is to go out at midnite, lite our fire pit under the tree and
*sleep* out there ????? He loves those pears.
We shall see.

Had ice on my potato plants, at 4 AM. I didn't uncover the tomato plants to look at them. Will check after work today.

George
Tahlequah, OK

Light to moderate frost here in Owasso this morning.

We had heavy frost here but the sun burned off the frost, and the fog, pretty quickly after it rose.

We were below freezing for a fairly brief time--less than an hour I think, but I had covered up everything that mattered except the fruit trees, which are too large to cover unless I buy a circus tent. (Hey, now that's an idea! I wonder what OkieTim would think about that? And the neighbors....would they think a circus tent in the yard was too odd?)

George, I hope your tomato plants are okay. I even covered up my potato plants this time which I normally don't do because a hard freeze and 26 degrees already had set them back really hard a few weeks ago.

Leava, I hope Jeff's pear tree made it through. I can understand his deep affection for it. Fresh fruit from your own trees is so incredibly good!

I think a lot of y'all might not have gotten as cold as we did (31 degrees) since we're in the Red River Valley.

For us, they're saying 42 tonight and I fear that could mean 38 and frost, so I'm leaving all my floating row covers on the plants today and will uncover them tomorrow. That's the nice thing about floating row covers....you can leave them on for days and days if wanted or needed.