Cooked and frozen - the looming disaster for our tree fruit
A little more than 5 years ago, I wrote a blog piece called Global Cooking . Maybe not so much for other readers at the time, but for myself. To document a winter that essentially wasn't happening, with early January temperatures in the 40s and 50s. Using a chart from the Weather Underground website , I wrote, "Today is the 26th consecutive day of above normal temperatures here. Every day during these past 26 has had a high temperature at least 7 degrees above normal." I also noted, among that year's oddities, that I had harvested broccoli in the garden on New Year's day. 5 years before that, in 2002, when 4 consecutive mid-April days in the 80s caused the fruit trees to bloom prematurely. But a frost nearly immediately thereafter completely wiped out that year's cherry crop, and reduced the apple crop by almost 90%. None of this prepared us for 2012. Here is the weather chart for March, 2012 from the Weather Underground site. The average high temp...
