Early spring

This prolonged warm weather is very scary for fruit growers. Fruit buds are moving along slowly. We don’t know how much they have advanced yet but with each warm day we lose a little hardiness. I guess that some seasonal cold nights in the teens would do some damage to stone fruit buds. I think it is a long shot that we will get through this with a full crop but each night that it doesn’t get real cold we are one day closer to having a crop. I am hoping for cold weather without any bitter cold nights to slow things down. I was always very confident that we would have some level of an economic crop but in 2002 we lost everything but the apples to early warm weather followed by a snowy cold spring. Now I am wondering about delaying expenses for equipment and projects until we get through this spring. It’s like rolling a huge boulder up the hill. You can’t just stop and rest!