I hate to hear it got so cold Dorothy. Do you know how long the temperatures were below 28 degrees? I've lost some but not all of the fruit when temperatures have dropped below 28 as long as the time period below 28 degrees was relatively short duration, maybe an hour or 90 minutes. So, maybe you won't lose all the fruit, though you might lose a large percentage. I hope you didn't lose all the stone fruit. When I lose all the stone fruit in a given year, it is either to one catastophically cold night--like, for example, 22 degrees for several hours, or I lose it on repeated nights where we lose a certain percentage the first very cold night, then lose more on the next cold night, and more on the next cold night until there is just nothing left after repeated cold nights.

We only dropped down to 32 degrees at our house and only for a couple of hours so I'm thinking most of my fruit might have made it through. I did move the potted fig and citrus trees back into the greenhouse and they are fine. I'll know in a few days, I guess, and there's still tonight when we'll be near freezing but not necessarily below freezing if the forecast is correct.

I'm hoping for the best and hoping maybe y'all stayed closer to freezing for a long time and maybe only dropped to 25 for an hour or so near sunrise. That would mean some stone fruit might survive.

Of course, it still is relatively early in March and all of us might have multiple freezing nights in our future still over the 2 to 4 or even 6 weeks. Making it through this weekend doesn't necessarily the fruit crops would make it through the next one.

I don't know. I was up at 3:30 but didn't check the most reliable thermometer--that transmits from the garden--on the porch as I didn't want to step onto the cold porch. The least reliable thermometer still said 32 but that is on the outside porch wall and transmits to indoors. It was probably colder in the garden at that time.

They forecast 28 for us last night and again tonight.

Here is a great chart from MSU on freezes. Sure it's variety specific but a good idea. Looks.like you could lose up to 90% if all you blooms where finished :( I only saw 31 but I was able to cover my trees. I keep them less than 8'.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://agbioresearch.msu.edu/uploads/396/36740/PictureTableofFruitFreezeDamageThresholds.pdf&ved=0ahUKEwil8MGC5s_LAhWLND4KHV1-C9MQFggbMAA&usg=AFQjCNEC1KNsS8g2PBPlEc74KFmbvH-nWQ&sig2=jjDPoY2ZnQPKtCYqYAiVsA

Mike

Here's a clickable link for the chart Mike linked.

Fruit Freeze Damage Thresholds

My old fig bush was covered in figs. They are gone. Mushy. But if the branches survive, a new crop of figs should put on later. I wish the fruit trees could bloom twice.

Me too!

Since I follow Dave Wilson backyard orchard pruning technique my trees are kept less than 8' by the end of summer. Comes in handy when this time of year. Here are mine this morning. Temperature under the blankets is 39. Outside is 28-29.

mike

You do a much better job of maintaining your tree size than I do with mine. I hate pruning. When I had a smaller garden, I did a better job with fruit tree maintenance, but nowadays I just wave at the fruit trees as I pass them on my way to the garden. Sometimes the deer do a lot of pruning for me. I like having big unruly fruit trees. (grin) How else am I going to get enough fruit to can hundreds of jars of jelly each year? (I rarely eat jelly because it is too sweet for me, but it makes great gifts for friends, and Tim and Chris eat tons of jelly and jam.)

My thermometer upstairs is showing a current temperature of 32 outside, but I haven't checked the Min-Max downstairs yet for the actual overnight low. We may have stayed warm enough that we didn't lose fruit. Time will tell.

All my front yard fruit trees are beginning to get shaded out by larger oak and pecan trees that surround them. When I planted the fruit trees in the late 1990s to early 2000s, I knew this eventually would happen, but figured that since I don't spray insecticides on my fruit trees, the borers would kill the trees before the oaks and pecans began to shade them out. Oddly, that hasn't happened with the plum trees, though it has happened with the peach trees. So, the downside is that the plum trees are on borrowed time. I might be able to get a crop from at least one of them for a few more years by limbing up the 2 oak trees closest to it. The upside is that we are going to be planting new fruit trees in a sunnier location over the next couple of years to make up for the ones we're losing to the encroaching shade. I'm also thinking about growing some dwarf fruit trees in molasses feed tubs, using a drip line to water them. I'd have to do more pruning for the trees in tubs though. So far, the fig tree in a molasses feed tub has produced really well, though it produces less fruit than the fig tree in the ground (which freezes back so often that it likely always will be more of a fig bush than a fig tree). The containerized fig doesn't lose the early crop to frost or freezing weather though, since I can drag it back into the greenhouse or cover it more easily than the one in the ground.

Dawn it can be a lot of work to keep them small. I usually end up pruning 2-3 times in the summer and one in the winter. Hopefully they will slow down now that they are going on the 3rd summer. I'm still deciding if this method is going to be a good idea. I have plenty of room for bigger trees so I may plant a few and let them get much larger. May need to actually to increase the amount of flowering wood to offset the freeze damage.

I'm showing an overnight low of 31. There is frost on the grass this morning. Oddly, all the weather stations around me claim not to have fallen below freezing and I am usually warmer than they are. Hopefully that is the end of it....

Our forecast was 29 last night, my Mesonet shows a low of 28, my min/max shows a low of 27, and my earliest potato plant which was a volunteer and about 4 inches tall was wilted and dark green although I had thrown a box over it last night. The surprising part is that the chicken water was not frozen although we must have been below freezing for 6 hours. I think we made it through these 3 nights with little damage, but sounds like Mother Nature gets another shot at us on Thursday night.

Mike, Please keep me posted on how your production does with such well-maintained trees. I think you'll still get plenty of fruit, and they'll likely be a really good size. Nobody around me who has stone fruit keeps them pruned that short so I"m curious about how heavily they'll produce, and one year I went and picked apricots off one of Fred's tree, and that tree must have been 20-25' tall, which made picking from the upper branches almost impossible, even from a tallish ladder. I keep my trees a respectable 12'-15' or so, because if they're taller than I can reach from a ladder, what's the point other then to let the birds have the fruit on the upper limbs.

Amy, I don't think it is the end. However, today we can turn our attention to the winds that will try to blow our plants all the way to another state, and the inherent fire danger we get when the winds are gusting in the 30s, 40s and 50s. The March weather roller coaster ride is in full force. Thursday night temperatures likely will be cold but maybe not as cold as they were for the last three nights.

Carol, Our chicken waterers didn't freeze either, and we were below freezing for at least 6 hours overnight. Maybe the warmer ground temperatures in general (compared to other March weather in colder springs) kept the waterers just above freezing, although the last 3 nights of cold weather caused my soil temperatures to fall quite a bit. At least your volunteer potato will bounce right back from the freeze damage. Had it been a volunteer tomato, it likely wouldn't recover. Despite the cold, none of my perennial flowers or herbs that weren't covered show the least bit of damage, so to look at the garden, you really can't tell we've been cold.

Today's wind (our forecast max high is only 29 mph) doesn't bother me much, but I'll probably let all the seedlings spend all day tomorrow and Wednesday in the greenhouse for wind protection since our forecast max wind gusts for those 2 days currently is 45 mph on Tues and 44 mph our Wed. We usually don't get wind as strong as what everyone gets in western, northern, central and northeastern OK, so if we're going to get 44-45, I imagine some places will be in the upper 40s and lower 50s. That's even too windy to be good kite-flying weather, and it certainly is enough wind to burn tender plant foliage.

I'm hoping that the weather will settle down as we move closer to April.

Dawn

I live between catoosa and inola and my min max recorded 25 I am afraid to look at plums and peaches. they had dropped bloom

I hate to hear that oldokie. Maybe y'all will get lucky and some of the fruit will survive, as long as y'all weren't at 25 for too long.

One year I had one lone plum survive. One. Kinda sad, but better than zero.