South Royalton
“We have a small homemade cider press,” said Betty LaWhite, 82, who has dozens of trees growing outside her home in South Royalton. “We make 200 gallons in a year when it’s good. This year, it will be zero.”
She said what little fruit has grown is nearly inedible.
“Trees that were always healthy are looking sick,” LaWhite said. “They’re yellow and puny and many of the branches inside the foliage are dead. I have a picker that reaches up and has grippers on it. I can hardly make it through the tangles of dead twigs.”
LaWhite is not alone.
Casual apple growers in the Twin States have noticed the signs of severe strain on their trees — dead limbs and branches that are barren of leaves or fruit.
“Right in front of the house is one,” said John MacGovern, 65, whose Windsor home is sited on property that includes a small, overgrown orchard. “It’s like you’re looking at a tree in December.”
Terence Bradshaw, a tree fruit specialist with the University of Vermont, said worried tree owners across the state are sending him photographs of trees that look like they’re in their death throes.
Most will survive, Bradshaw said.
“All is not lost,” he said. “The trees just don’t have the energy and focus to make shoots and fruits. They’re hunkering down.”
The trees’ woes began last year, when a wet and humid summer set the stage for an explosion of apple scabs and other fungal disease organisms that need moisture to thrive. That moisture also led trees to overextend their reserves to produce a bumper apple crop.
Things got worse in December, when a relatively mild fall gave way to a severe cold snap.
“These trees can take 35 or 40 below zero, but it’s the cold snaps that are the problem,” Bradshaw said. When the cold comes quickly, the tree hasn’t had an opportunity to harden itself against freezing temperatures.
“You often get damage to the tissue in the limbs of the tree, or maybe in the trunk,” Bradshaw said.
Even the one-two punch of a disease-friendly summer and a sudden-onset harsh winter wasn’t enough to threaten tree populations, but then the summer of 2018 came with a fresh challenge: drought, which hampered the ability of the already-weakened trees to heal themselves.
Apple orchards, where trees are tended with a careful regimen that includes food, water and pest control, have not been seriously affected. It’s the unprotected feral trees that are bearing the brunt of the weather conditions.
“I don’t do any spraying,” LaWhite said. “I’m sort of suffering the vagaries of whatever nature throws at me.”
Bradshaw said the upcoming season will have a big impact on how those untended trees survive.
“The worst-case scenario is another really hard winter. Then we might lose a lot of trees,” Bradshaw said.
And not only apple trees — he said the same conditions are hitting other species hard as well.
Experts say climate change has altered the world’s weather patterns in ways that are leading to more extreme heat, cold and intense weather events.
“More and more in the last 20 years, we are seeing the first frost date getting later and later,” Bradshaw said.
That’s not always a problem.
“If the later frost date is a milder winter, then we’re good. We’ll start growing peaches,” Bradshaw said.
And LaWhite said she is doing just that.
“I’ve gone into peaches more,” she said. “Last year, my tree almost broke apart it had so many.”
She also said that a burgundy apple tree was so unprepared for a recent hot summer that the dark-skinned fruit literally cooked on the tree.
But Bradshaw said the hot summers haven’t translated into warmer winters.
“We’ve been getting later frosts and harder winters,” he said.
Bradshaw said the changing weather patterns are unlikely to wipe out apple trees from the area because they are a highly adaptable species that grows in areas as diverse as its native Kazakhstan, South Africa, New England and Australia.
But, he said, the changes will make it more expensive for commercial orchards to keep their trees healthy, and individual trees that have grown up in a pre-global warming climate likely will perish more quickly, opposed to the century of age they can attain in optimal conditions.
“If you really love a tree, take care of it,” he said. “You can say that about any tree, really.”
Bradshaw doesn’t advise people to rush out this season in a late bid to fertilize or spray their trees. But he did say pruning the dead wood out of trees will eliminate infection paths and allow more sunlight to get through.
He also recommended ensuring that the environment around the trees allows as much sun as possible.
“Open them up,” he said. “I want to be able to see the trunk. That’s the standard for a tree: to be open and airy, with a minimum of deadwood.”
He recommended that those with questions about plant care contact their area cooperative extension master gardeners.
Matt Hongoltz-Hetling can be reached at mhonghet@vnews.com or 603-727-3211.