The ice and snow between Sunday and Monday will apparently not do widespread damage to the region’s fruit-tree crop. That’s according to Timothy Smith, who runs Apex Orchards, a 35-acre apple, peach and pear farm in Shelburne, Massachusetts.
Two years ago, an April hard frost killed off nearly the entire peach crop in the Northeast. But Smith says the spring weather, overall, has been so cool, the trees are still mostly dormant.
“We don’t have any green tissue showing or any signs of growth like we did a couple years ago when we had some spring damage from frost, things that advanced quite a bit more back then,” he says. “It was actually a little bit colder too, we’ve only been down to 30 degrees here I guess overnight.”
Smith says the weight of the freezing rain didn’t effect the fruit-tree limbs, because they’re pruned back.
This story was originally published by New England Public Radio for the New England News Collaborative.