RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) - Growers have had their fingers crossed while spraying tender plants with water or covering them up to protect them from damage during an early-spring cold snap in North Carolina.
Media outlets report temperatures dropped to freezing and below across wide swaths of the state on Wednesday threatening everything from strawberries and tomatoes to peppers and squash.
And while the temperatures should moderate during the next day or two, the cold weather isn’t over.
Forecasters with the National Weather Service in Raleigh say another shot of cold air will descend on the state this weekend. Forecasters say the way it looks now, there’s a strong likelihood of a hard freeze and widespread frost overnight Saturday and into Sunday morning.
“We’ve had frost-freezes this late in the year but it seems like the weather’s just been so up and down recently,” Mike Skinner, the owner of Strawberries On 903 in Pitt County told WNCT (https://bit.ly/23hAvtG ).
“What we’re more concerned about is these blooms that are just blooming out. They cannot stand anything below 32 degrees,” he said.
Michelle Patterson of Patterson Farms told the Salisbury Post (https://bit.ly/1Sc5C1V ) that because of recent warm weather some of the farm’s strawberries were already ripe so workers were out picking them Tuesday before the cold weather.
While covering plants and using heaters to keep vegetation warm seems obvious, a more counter-intuitive way of protecting young plants is spraying them with water so that ice forms.
A horticulture information leaflet from North Carolina State University explains that heat lost from the plant to the air is replaced by the heat released when water sprayed on a plant turns to ice. As one gram of water freezes, 80 calories of heat energy are released to keep the plants warm.
North Carolina is the nation’s third-leading producer of strawberries behind California and Florida in terms of the value of its crop, according to the North Carolina Strawberry Association website.
In 2012 more than 20 million pounds of strawberries were harvested in the state producing almost $30 million of farm income, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.