Growers hope April frost won't hurt crops

The dreaded April frost came last week but Niagara-on-the-Lake stone fruit and grape growers are confident all is not lost.

“We don’t think we have much damage,” said Scott MacSween, owner of NOTL's MacSween Farms, which produces fruits such as apricots, cherries and nectaries. “It was touch and go but we still expect a full crop.”

Area farmers woke up to frost on Thursday, April 25 and feared the worst. The following day, overnight temperatures hovered right around zero, though frost was evident in some areas of NOTL on Friday morning.

An early bloom two weeks ago set the stage for concern. The normal time for stone fruits to flower is the end of April or early May.

However, a mild January helped kickstart fruit trees into blooming early, putting them at risk being killed by sustained overnight sub-zero temperatures, which are all too common at this time of the year.

MacSween was in close contact with a number of other stone fruit farmers in NOTL over the course of the two days and reports they too believe it could have been a lot worse.

“I am optimistic,” he said.

“If it would have been minus 3 (on April 26), I would have been confident to say that we lost around 50 per cent. But we weren’t at minus 3. It was zero.”

Confidence aside, the big sigh of relief won’t come for another week or so, MacSween said.

Stone fruit farmers typically overproduce by about 70 per cent of their fruit and prune off damaged or dead foliage starting in June.

So, even if 30 to 40 per cent of the crop was damaged or killed by this week’s temperatures, it would still be considered a good crop.

Richard Wright, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The Lake Report