Late Frost – protecting early blooming trees.

We've been facing successive nights of hard frost here in Northern California.  I know my mother must be laughing bitterly (she's in Wyoming and the look of hard February March weather in Wyoming does NOT look anything like the above) but Northern California can be heartbreaking because of its see-saw between balmy days then the crush of  icy weather.  The balmy days wheedle the tender fruit blossoms out, and then once the nascent fruit begins its journey toward luscious apricots, peaches, or plums, Whammmo!

Frost.

So we do a panicked dance with lightweight covers on our trees, wafting them up and around as if we were matadors and the trees many horned bulls.  It is incredibly hard to get fabric around the branches, the trees do not want to cooperate, for some reason, shrugging off the fabric one minute, clawing it closer the next.

Once up it looks rather pretty.  Like the clouds have settled in the branches of the little orchard.   There are other means of protecting the fruit – christmas lights in the branches generate enough heat to stymie frost (and then you can leave them up for your next garden party!) and some people turn sprinklers on which seems like it wouldn't be really useful, but there is science backing it up.  We decided to use the fabric, for one reason I needed the light row cover fabric to actually cover a few rows of plants when I plant the next stage of garden.  Beyond that, we use sheets, or…whatever else we've got available

The new, tender navel orange we planted actually looks like a sunbather facing a beachfront squall, all wrapped up in a pool towel.  Will our efforts pay off?  We won't know for weeks yet, when the blossoms are all off and we can peer into the cup they left and see if there are the tiny infants of fruit growing inside.