I'm seeing a few blooms on my peach tree this year. (I had none last year.) But I'm also seeing what appear to be quite a few dead branches. I'm in Arvada.

What I've gathered is to give everything a few more weeks to a month before you make the call. For those of us that are not that patient, scratch test the branches that seem to be dead, Just gently scrape your fingernail along a small section of the branch just deeper than the bark. If you see green, give it a chance. If it's just brown and brittle, it's dead and you can prune it off.

We're going to have some weird looking trees for a few years, but most will grow out of it. To me, I'd rather live with that than replace them.

That sounds like good advice, treebarb. Be patient. If anything, it's just a few branches. The good news is I actually do see blooms so I should have some peaches this year rather than none.

Noticed a lot of mortality as well as a lot of late bud break from last fall's freeze. Good news is wet spring will help.

Fruit trees and roses seem to have taken a bit of a hit this year; from what I have read, last fall's warm weather caused a lot of trees not to go into dormancy at the 'normal' time so the sudden freeze really zapped them. I'm thinking that is what happened with my roses as well. (Luckily, most of my roses are own-root and the ones with the most die back are coming back from the roots.) Bummer, though, especially for the fruit trees. A neighbor's peach tree, which has had some wonderful years, full of so much fruit that he was giving it away, seems to have only one branch still alive.

I hope your trees recover, Diane. :-(

Holly

My French Improved Prune tree is going to meet a chainsaw pretty quick here. There's like one out of 4 branches that flowered and leafed out, and thats covered in aphids.

I pruned my roses last weekend and there is not much left, but they are own roots, so hopefully they'll come back.

It looks like I lost my Granny Smith apple tree, buds are dark and crumble right off when touched. I guess they reclassified it to zone 6 and that we are not! The big Golden Delicious tree is looking pretty rough but is at least starting to leaf, no flowering though. The Honeycrisp is leafing out, but no flowering either. Looks like I may not get apples this year.

I planted a 1 - 2 foot apricot whip in the spring of 2013, pre flood. It's now 7 feet tall and has leafed this spring but hasn't bloomed. I thought that would be the one to get zapped, that's crazy growth for a tree at my place. Now that I think about it, it went dormant before the fall temp swing. .

A landscape I manage has - literally - hundreds of dead shrubs - dwarf arctic willow, cotoneaster, juniper, viburnum...ugh.

Sorry to hear about your apple trees, Barb. At least two of them are still with the living....Honeycrisp apples have become my favorites, too. I didn't know the tree's Zone had been reclassified, either. I did a quick web search for Granny Smith apple trees; none of the sites I checked have updated their zone recommendations as yet, some still show that the tree is good for Zone 4.

Wow, Dan, sounds as if you have quite a mess on your hands.... It would be devastating to lose hundreds of plants over the winter..... :(

I lost a spreading cotoneaster that has been thriving for about 15 years or more, but this spring it only seemed to have a few viable sprigs on it so I dug it out. It had been getting less vigorous in the past few years so I figured it had just reached it's natural lifespan, but perhaps the cold snap pushed it over the edge. Still, other than my poor roses, which are recovering, I guess I lucked out compared to many here.

Holly

Holly,

It took me a while to remember where I read that Granny Smith is zone 6. It was from the Front Range Tree Recommendation List. It's on both the Colorado Tree Coalition and the CSU extension website under Malus. It scored a D on the A - F grading scale.

Front Range Tree Recommendation List

Well the apricot and the crab apple have come back some. The cherry tree has only a few branches with leaves. I notice that one of my roses is MIA too.
Bummer.
Diane

Unfortunately, I may have lost my red haven peach tree too.

Silver linings: all the dead fruit trees will make for good smoking wood! Let me know if you're in need of removal ;).

None of my trees look dead, just the hail and snow ruined the blooms. I have a Serviceberry that was in full bloom, flowers are gone. :( I didn't feel the Dwarf Granny Smith apple or Prairie Fire Crabapple were in full bloom though, so will they try to recover and bloom more or is that all?

Zach, I've got a pair of tri-tips that are going to meet some peach wood bbq this weekend. :)

Ooooh! Is that an invite David, I'll bring my own meat?

Well, it better stop raining. We're @ 90% chance of rain all day.

/got the soggy charcoal blues :(

We're in the bull's eye for hail last year and this year. The good thing with the hail today is that it knocked off the leaves melted in last week's freeze...

Update: I had to have my peach tree treated for some sort of insect infestation. Turns out that when examined more closely, it was seeping big blobs of sap. I had it treated and a nutritional feeding done by a local arborist.

They also did note some branches that look like they may be dead on the ends, but recommended waiting until the end of Summer to trim. Trimming now could lead to more insects.

We get the dreaded peach tree borers around here, and they've killed a few of my attempts.