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Chris Sayer pushed his way through avocado branches and grasped a denuded limb. It was stained black, as if someone had ladled tar over its bark. In February, the temperature had dropped below freezing for three hours, killing the limb. The thick leaves had shriveled and fallen away, exposing the green avocados, which then burned in the sun. Sayer estimated he’d lost one out of every 20 avocados on his farm in Ventura, just 50 miles north of Los Angeles, but he counts himself lucky.
“If that freeze was one degree colder, or one hour longer, we would have had major damage,” he said.
Avocado trees start to die when the temperature falls below 28 degrees or rises above 100 degrees. If the weather turns cold and clammy during the short period in the spring when the flowers bloom, bees won’t take to the air and fruits won’t develop. The trees also die if water runs […]
I may be just a gardener here on the eastern side of the U.S., in Pa., I have a seen a difference in the weather that has effected my garden. We had to plant later, had more rain than ever, and it has not been hot enough to grow our peppers which are an invaluable source for our tomato sauce making. The tomatoes are doing OK, but the onions are too small to be any good to make sauce, because they are too small this year. I do not know why the onions are so small. We planted the same kind we have planted every year since 1990 and are a big part of our tomato sauce which we use a lot. Our tomato sauce is our most valuable asset since we, too, depend upon our garden for most of our food. We do have a promising squash assortment that will keep for a year or at least almost a year in our cold cellar. Our beets are doing great and we will use them as pickled beets as well as frozen for our consumption during the coming year. We will also see what the Amish have to supplement our own garden food. I know all the best Amish growers who are more organic than some of the others. We only eat organic, so going to the grocery store is something we definitely do not want to have to do because of the outrageous prices, and we live on Social Security, and have no extra money. I just hope I can get our 1990 car ready to pass inspection so we can go anywhere at all because I do all my own automotive work, and of course an old car like ours always needs work. We can barely survive in this “Trumpian” world. We just hope Trump doesn’t cut S.S. and or Medicare or we’ll be in big trouble and probably not be able to survive.