Balmy spring no boon to area orchards

Who thinks this extra-warm spring has been horrible?

What’s not to like about sun-kissed 80-degree days, balmy evenings eating dinner out on the deck, early-morning jogs that don’t require donning a jacket and mittens?

Don’t get Wade Kuipers of Maple Park started. The weather is disastrous, he said Thursday.

“This is a really serious situation,” the apple orchard owner said.

Kuipers is keeping an anxious eye on the more than 8,000 apple trees at Kuipers Family Farm. The trees are about six weeks ahead of schedule, acting like it is May 1. They have already budded, a few flowers have popped out, and if this keeps up, they’ll soon be setting fruit.

Kuipers fears a frost or hard freeze could damage his crop, or even wipe it out. Statistically, we are still likely to get such cold weather.

The median date of the last freeze, over the past 30 years, is April 9. The average last frost date is May 15 for this area. And from 1971 to 2000, the month of April saw on average 8 days of below-freezing temperatures, according to the Illinois Climatological Survey.

Kuipers installed a $30,000, 36-foot-tall windmill Thursday. The windmill will drag warm air down in to the orchard during a freeze, keeping the trees a few degrees warmer. But at 28 degrees Fahrenheit, he would expect up to 10 percent of the crop to be ruined; at 25 degrees, 90 percent.

Furthermore, there’s no crop insurance program in Kane County for apples, unlike for soybeans and field corn. And since Kuipers sells directly to consumers, including a U-pick operation, it would be an especially devastating loss. (Kuipers also grows pumpkins, and has a store where it sells baked goods made from its apples, as well as other food and gift products.)

It’s not just the trees. Kuipers has to rent bees earlier than ever to pollinate the crop. Normally, the bees would still be hibernating, Kuipers said, but the beekeeper he uses said they are all up and raring to go.

The cooler, rainier weather Friday and expected Saturday, with overnight lows in the 40s, should delay bloom some, he said.

Other crops

Those frost/freeze dates are the reasons you won’t see experienced soybean and corn farmers out planting just yet. At $200 to $300 a bag for seed corn to cover about 2 acres, Wayne Schneider doesn’t want to place the bet. And crop insurance doesn’t cover losses if you plant earlier than recommended.

He farms in Dundee Township, on his own and for the Max McGraw Wildlife Foundation property on Route 25.

“I’m thinking somewhere down the road we’re going to pay for this (warm weather),” he said Thursday. He normally plants in the second half of April. However, he has been able to till the fields.

“And it is nice to do machine prep in a T-shirt,” instead of 40-degree rainy weather, Schneider said.

Kane County Board member Mike Kenyon of South Elgin, spotted at the Farm Bureau’s Ag Days Thursday, said he, too, isn’t planting his acreage. “In farming, sometimes it’s better not to be the first,” he said.

Your yard

What about your dogwood and crabapple trees, the lilac bushes, and other landscaping in your yard?

Meagan Provencher, landscape designer with Wasco Nursery, said if frost and freeze comes, it may burn the tips of the leaves, and the plants may drop the leaves. But it won’t kill the trees and shrubs, she said. “It’s mostly cosmetic.”

This spring has been weird because blooming usually comes in phases, Provencher said. But this year, “It’s more like everything is blooming all at once,” she said, referring to magnolias, pears, crabapples, redbuds.

She hopes bees will catch up with fruit tree blooms.

And it is still not time to plant your tomatoes, she said.

It’s been busy at the nursery. The staff had to hurry and dig plants and trees out of their fields before they leafed out.

And there have been more customers than usual at this time of year.

“It’s crazy. It’s fun. It’s shocking,” Provencher said.