- Thanks to an early spring, many fruit trees blossomed early, but it leaves them vulnerable to spring freezes.
- Farmers like Thayne Tagge expect a lighter crop, but adds the quality will be excellent.
PARADISE, Cache County — After a long battle against the cold overnight, Merv Weeks was checking on the damage to his wide variety of crops at Weeks Berries of Paradise. Despite lighting several barrels to try to keep cherry and plum trees warm, he's still seeing significant losses.
"I got to the point where I thought, 'It's not going to work,' when it got so cold that I decided to go to sleep," Weeks said.
He suspects very little will remain from his cherry trees, though he will still have some plums to sell, as well as blueberries. Weeks adds that virtually all of his crops of strawberries seem to have survived, thanks to being contained in a hoop house.
"We got plenty of strawberries," Weeks said. "We'll have a lot of raspberries because a lot of them are still coming up out of the ground."
To the south, in Perry and Willard, Box Elder County, farmers observed a significant loss in peaches, and even worse for apricots. Thayne Tagge said, despite the losses, he's still optimistic and believes they'll have plenty of produce to sell at Tagge's Famous Fruits and Veggies. He says the now thinned-out peaches will leave room for the remaining ones to grow large.
"It's gonna be a light crop, I guarantee that," Tagge said. "But it's going to be really good quality because they'll be big."
Thanks to an especially warm early spring, many of the fruit trees blossomed about a month early. Farmers said that in itself is not a bad thing, but it does leave a longer stretch of time before the summer, when freezes overnight can occur.
"We'll have a crop," Weeks said, looking at his blueberries. "Might have been affected some, but a little bit, it depends what goes on from here on. We'll probably have another spell."
