Since the earliest days of Blue Bee Cider, we have had challenges and hard luck. The longer you work here, the more you share in our common memories of bad weather, equipment failures, human errors, and all the fallout. But almost every time we come out on the other side with a new relationship, a technical solution, or a product idea that really makes us better off. I used to call these our silver linings.
If you have been watching the local news the past two weeks, you may have heard about the devastating freezes in Virginia orchards and vineyards. As fruit tree buds and blossoms develop, they are increasingly less tolerant of cold temperatures. Here is a guide to put things in context. Our warm Easter was cut short by two freeze events, unlike anything the older growers have seen since 1976. The second freeze on April 10, down to 19 degrees in some places, left us with a full crop of dead flowers on just about every block and the general mood has been grim.
Throughout the spring, Virginia Cooperative Extension organizes Fruit School meetings to bring Virginia fruit tree growers together to learn from each other. Yesterday was the first Fruit School since the freezes. Attendance was high. Everyone was ready to pull together to support each other and find answers in friendship and science, but we also found some serendipity.
Dr. Jim Schupp of Penn State came down to share his knowledge of and experiences dealing with freeze recovery. We hung on his every word. My key takeaway is that the freeze did our thinning for us. Fruit trees tend to produce 800% more blossoms than they can carry to fruition. In normal years this means that we thin off lots of excess fruit to improve the survival and size of the remaining fruit. This year even with 80% blossom loss, if the remaining 20% are all pollinated, it might still be too much for a tree to carry to fruition. His words, based in scientific research, helped to change our outlook, “Focus on what is living, not what is dead.”
Now it just so happened that the morning of Fruit School, there was an outbreak of late blooms in the country orchard. These secondary blooms usually don’t make it very far. They are usually outcompeted by early bloomers. But this year, they will be the crop and a potentially decent one at that, pending pollination and weather for the next three weeks. The picture above was the fresh batch of new blossoms that emerged that morning – the first sign of a new beginning in over a week.
While I certainly don’t want this level of drama to be the norm for us, it does drive home powerful lessons about those silver linings, our secondary blooms. New friendships, new solutions, new ciders, new hope; they are new every morning, every day.
-Courtney Mailey
