DAYTON — It’s that time of the year to head to the apple orchard and the pumpkin patch with the family! The issue is you may not see as many or as large of apples this year.
In order to have an optimal apple harvest, we want 3 things to happen: a sufficient amount of chill hours below 45 degrees in the winter, a gradual warm up in the spring, and a warm and moderately wet summer. We had a great start with the chill hours in winter, but spring threw our apple trees a wrench.
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Meteorological spring is March, April, and May. From March 1 to April 30, high temperatures were running around 5 degrees above average! Safe to say it was not a gradual warm up, and that caused the apple trees to blossom earlier than expected.
The second downside was our summer. It was rather seasonable which was good, but still ran around 1 degree above average. We don’t want summer to be too hot. The real downside was the lack of rain, especially in late summer. Rainfall from August 1 to September 30 was running just about 3 inches below average! That lack of rain certainly didn’t help those apples grow to the fullest potential.
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We have received a better amount of rain in October, but it seems to be too little too late for that rain to be very beneficial to the apple trees this late in the season.
