By Clint Thompson
The impact from last week’s sub-freezing temperatures on Georgia blueberries will not be known until late next week.
Jerome Crosby, chairman of the Georgia Blueberry Commission, said more detailed scouting next week should yield an accurate assessment of where the crop stands heading into the upcoming harvest season.
“We’re trying to get some numbers together, field scouting and crop estimation. We’ve got our crop scouts lined up to go out next week and try to figure that out,” Crosby said. “It takes about a week to let all the damage to the blooms start to show up and browning. Then you’ve got to do a measurement, you can’t gauge it by one field. We’re going to try to take a sampling across the spectrum of the crop in several locations and try to get a measurement to be as accurate as we can.
“We’re trying to be more cautious and realistic about our numbers because bad information has cost us a lot of money.”
The timing could not have been much worse for blueberry growers to experience this latest freeze event following Jan. 30 when temperatures dropped into the teens in some areas. Especially in South Georgia last weekend, berries were not only on the bushes already, but a lot of the fruit was beginning to color and mature.
“In January, you had winter-hardened plants that basically just had buds. This weekend you had spring growth, lush green leaves, green berries already on the plants; it was much more tender and fragile,” Crosby said. “It takes several days to see if freezing those berries saved it or destroyed it.”