Farmer 'N The Dell

Frozen Mandarins

If you’re a grower, this is a picture you never want to see. The temperature dropped down to 20 degrees last night, and in a bid to save the fruit on the trees, we turned on the sprinklers, raining water down that froze into eerie arctic-looking icicles.

 

The latest cold snap has been a brutal one. The last four nights have seen sub-freezing temperatures, the last two nights descending into the low twenties and teens. Ripe mandarin oranges can withstand temperatures in the low-twenties, provided it’s for a short period of time. But the last two nights have seen ten hours or more of freezing temperatures each night, and with 80% of our crop still on trees, could turn a bumper crop into a bust.

 

You might wonder with all our fears of cold weather why we’re purposely turning our trees into ice cubes. Spraying citrus trees with water is an old technique, designed to insulate the fruit from sub-freezing temperatures by covering them with a layer of 32 degree ice. We’ve run the sprinklers from sundown to sun up the last two nights, but with the prolonged periods of sub-freezing weather, it’s too early to tell if we’ve made a difference.

 

We’ll start picking again in a few days,  when the full extent of the damage will be evident.