It is obvious with such a record warm March, trouble lies ahead.  Our normal hard freeze (below 28F) occurs in late April.  Our last frost date (32F and below) is around mid May.  Most fruit trees, when in bloom, can take an air temp (at the 5 foot level) of 28F, but are destroyed at a temp of 23F–in between who knows what and depends on the type of fruit, whether there is a wind or not, the humidity,  and a bunch of other factors.  Warm weather veggies like tomatoes and peppers are sometimes damaged at an air temp of 35F and usually destroyed when it gets down to 31F.  Right now we are only concerned about the fruit since while we have planted cool weather veggies like peas, radishes, lettuce and kohlrabi, (which can really take the low temps) it will be over a month before we set out our warm stuff without protection (e.g. high and low tunnels).  Now, there is something one can do to help fruit trees through freezes–it is preparing the soil in the orchard to get rid of the grass and weeds so bare ground is showing.
We have already started to do this.  We are discing the orchard to cut into the grass a couple of inches.  Since our main apple orchard (the one you can see from the road) has very heavy (clay) soil it is well suited to keep frost away as long as their isn’t heavy grass/weed growth.  Clay soil you see, has a high heat content AND has great conductivity so the heat from down in the ground is conducted to the surface as the surface soil cools–it acts nearly (perhaps even better at times) than if the trees were planted in a lake. However, keeping the weeds down is time consuming and costly (fuel expenses) but if it protect the crop it is well worth it.  In orchards planted in light dry sand bare ground has little affect.  If the sandy soil is moist (not wet), however, some good is done.

Last night, it got down to 29.7F by the lake, 28F in Fremont at the Waste water facility just south of the city, 28F at our market and 29F in our orchard.  Since according to the literature the critical temp for 10% kill for apples in tight cluster is 27F, there should be no significant damage.  There is another freeze warning for tonight…

The Shadbush, also called Juneberries, are now in full bloom.  The Shadbush receive its name since the early settlers noted that the Shad started running when a certain shrub bloomed.  They named this shrub, the Shadbush.  It is also called Juneberry since it has a tasty berry in June.   Since there are no Shad in the Newaygo Chain of Lakes, there are plenty of bluegills and they apparently move into the shallows at the same time.  Even though the Shadbush have bloomed earlier than anybody can remember, their blooming is coinciding with the bluegills moving into the shallows.  If you are looking for tasty bluegills, pick a nice sunny day and you should have luck by fishing the shallows.  When do bluegills start spawning?  That’s an easy one.  When the Dogwoods and Redbud are in full bloom!

Lettuce we transplanted to our unheated greenhouse on 2/9/2012. Photo above taken on 3/2/12.

On 1/17/12 we planted Freckles, Green Ice, Winter Density and Buttercrunch lettuce in a flat.  See my earlier post with photos.  Then we transplanted some of the plants (we planted too many seeds for the small space we devoted to the test lettuce planting) into the unheated greenhouse after preparing the soil.  See my earlier post.  While I call it an unheated greenhouse I do have an automatic control that turned on soil heating cables and a red 60 watt light bulb when the temp dropped below 35F.  Today I removed the soil heating cables since I don’t think it’s going to get super cold again this year.  By the way, the outside air temp got down to near zero twice.  Also, on a couple of sunny days the temp underneath the low tunnel (which are inside the greenhouse) got to over 100F a couple of times.  So far we are pleased on how the lettuce are doing. Here is another photo:

Close-up of Green Ice and Winter Density