News

St. Patrick’s Day freeze whacks apple crop

Although apple blossoms are pretty to look at, they spell trouble for growers when early flowering is followed by a frost or freeze, as happened last week in Henderson County orchards. [LIGHTNING FILE PHOTO]

By Bill Moss, Published: March 26, 2026

Those sunny 70-degree days sure feel good in February after an ice storm, a deep freeze and a blanket of snow.

But not quite good for all.

In what’s become more the rule than the exception, a warm spell in February followed by overnight lows in the teens and 20s has threatened this year’s apple and peach crops in Henderson County — and there’s likely to be more cycles of toasty days followed by frosty nights.

Looking back to the days after the ice and snow, Edneyville apple grower Kenny Barnwell recalls a fleeting sense of optimism.

“Right now we’re in a cycle where everything looks good — we get our chill units (hours of below-freezing temperatures) and then right there in the first of March we have warm weather” that opens buds into vulnerable flowers, he said. “It has not been an ideal time to grow apples in Western North Carolina.”

Terry Kelley, the county’s agriculture extension director, said last week it’s too early to fully assess the damage caused by the March 17 freeze.

“If it had just been a frost, it’d be one thing but I had one grower tell me it got down to 17,” he said. “You start getting below 28 for any length of time, you start getting freeze damage instead of frost damage, and that’s just going to destroy the green tissue that’s out there.”

Galas, Granny Smiths, pink ladies and other early bloomers were likely to have suffered more damage.

“I’m sure some of the later blooming stuff will be OK for now but it’s the middle of March so we got a little ways to go before we’re out of the woods,” he said.  

One calamity after another

For dozens of growers in the county and a crop that in a good year is worth more than $30 million, bad years have become all too familiar. Just in the past five years, doom has come in the form of Tropical Storm Fred (2021), spring freezes and frosts, Hurricane Helene (2024), hailstorms and poor pollination (last year).

“It’s been a while since our apple growers have had a normal, easy year,” Kelley said. “I think 2022 was the last time we had a really good crop and prices were not favorable, so it seems like you get hit from one side or the other.”

Barnwell, who recorded a low of 22 at his house in Edneyville, held out hope that enough young buds survived to produce a crop.

“Actually we got through it better than I ever thought we would without a lot of damage,” he said. “We had a big fruit bud. I think there’s plenty of apples that made it through to make the biggest part of a normal crop. I  don’t know what the quality will be because those cells are damaged. In some of the earliest varieties 70-80 percent of the blossoms are damaged but we really only need about 10 to 15 percent of what was on the tree to have a good crop.”

The freeze could even have helped by doing the thinning job naturally that growers would ordinarily have to do by hand or by spraying chemicals.

Easter frosts are common

But even if they survive the St. Patrick’s Day freeze, growers are wary about the coming weeks.

“Three of the last five years we’ve had a pretty good frost right around Easter,” Barnwell said. “In the last seven years we haven’t had any ideal growing conditions.”

New risk looms as early as Saturday night, when lows are projected to dip down to 33.

If the county can produce a good crop, Barnwell is hopeful that the market will stay steady.

“We had a lot of demand late last year,” he said. “Our production input cost is going up, labor is going up, and we are not getting any more out of our apples. With the price of land in Henderson County it’s getting really hard.”

Uncertainty in the global oil market because of the Iran war has driven up the cost of fertilizer by more than 50 percent.

Although they don’t wish bad news on their fellow growers elsewhere, farmers keep an eye on harvest potential because they know that supply moves the price.

“I think this freeze affected the crop all the way up the whole East Coast — peaches and apples,” Barnwell said. An apple grower friend in Michigan “was pruning some trees (before the freeze) and they were dripping sap,” he said. “It got down to 11 degrees up there.”

Given the now common pattern of warm spells in winter followed by cold snaps in spring, we asked Dr. Kelley whether apple growing here at some point would become nonviable.

“It’s certainly something of a concern that we don’t seem to have the climate that we that we used to and maybe it’s a little less conducive to good production,” he said. “Still, we grow good apples here. That’s what we’re marketing on and selling on.”

“You hear so much about farmland preservation,” he added. “The easiest way to preserve farmland is to make our farmers profitable.”

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