Strawberry Crop Lost to Freeze : Early Fruit Nipped; Avocados Also Hit

For the second year in a row, the bulk of San Diego County’s initial--and lucrative--strawberry crop has been lost to frigid temperatures, pushing the first harvest of the season back from late January to late February.

And avocado growers in the county, still reeling from last January’s freeze, were stung by a second punch from the weather and now risk losing their third consecutive avocado crop, officials reported.

Avocado growers say they may not know the full extent of the damage until spring, when they will learn whether their trees will be able to produce flower buds for next year’s Haas avocado crop.

Two-Season Toll

The frost 11 months ago not only destroyed the fruit on the trees at that time, but prevented many of the trees from blossoming last spring for this year’s crop--thereby effectively taking a two-season toll with one night of destructive cold. Those same groves were again hardest hit by last week’s freeze, area growers reported Monday, and while there was relatively little fruit on those trees (because of last year’s damage), the freeze may again prevent another spring bloom.

Damage from the January freeze was estimated at $35 million. Industry officials say it is too early to put a price tag on the damage caused by the extended Christmas freeze.

“In a sense, there was no immediate avocado crop loss because there was no crop to lose in the first place,” said Charley Wolk, a grove manager and a vice president of the San Diego County Farm Bureau.

“But what might happen now is those trees which would have blossomed in the spring might not, now, because of this newest freeze, and growers might end up having lost their ‘88-’89 crop as well,” Wolk said.

Warren Currier, executive secretary of the Escondido-based Avocado Growers Assn., an avocado trade organization, agreed with Wolk that those areas hit hardest 11 months ago fell into the same misfortune last week, the victims of a one-two punch.

“While we lost between 60-million and 100-million pounds of fruit last year, I don’t think we lost 5-million pounds last week simply because there wasn’t much fruit on those trees,” Currier said.

“But you’ve got to assume that the cold will affect the flowering (in the spring), so some growers are looking at three years with very little crop.”

Damage Will Surface

Some avocado damage will surface within the next few days, Currier said, as stems of existing fruit turn brown, indicating that they no longer will effectively transmit nutrients from the tree to the fruit.

The extent of that damage might not be known for two weeks, because some fruit will continue to grow even though the stems appear lifeless, Currier said. The fruit is generally too immature to be picked now, so growers are advised to simply wait it out and take their ultimate losses rather than to try to pick avocados that are too young to ripen.

Generally, those avocado groves hit hardest by the two major freezes had not been damaged by the high winds of two weeks ago--and, conversely, those groves stripped of fruit by the winds appear to have escaped the most serious freeze damage, growers say.

Retail prices of avocados this year will remain unchanged over last year, growers generally agreed, although the quality of fruit might be somewhat lower.

A Bad Freeze

Wilbur Shigehara, the U.S. Weather Service’s chief meteorologist for San Diego, said last week’s freeze was worse than that of January’s not only because the temperatures were a bit colder but because they lingered longer.

“We had more nights of cold temperatures, and the cold temperatures went higher up (in elevation). The air was so cold, there was very little differentiation in elevations,” Shigehara said, between the lower-lying groves and higher ones.

He noted that some growers tried every tool available to them--wind machines, grove heaters and sprinkling--to ward off the cold, and most of the actions were ineffective in warding off the frost.

Bill Snodgrass, the county’s assistant agricultural commissioner, said reports to his office indicated the cold temperatures were more widespread last week than they were 11 months ago.

“Usually the lowest areas get the most damage, but we saw colder temperatures closer to the coast and even in higher elevations in Vista and Fallbrook,” Snodgrass said.

The county’s citrus crop was largely unaffected by the cold, although there were scattered reports of frost damage in the North County, Snodgrass said.

Strawberry Shock

Little could be done to save the strawberry crop, because the coldest, ground-hugging air sometimes runs still three to four degrees lower than the air even just five or six feet above it.

The county’s crop of strawberry plants had flowered and was just about to start showing tiny green fruit which would have ripened and been ready for harvest in mid- to late January, growers say.

Last week’s cold sent the tender plants into shock, dropping their set flowers and turning their leaves black, area strawberry growers reported.

The area’s strawberry growers faced the same misfortune 11 months ago, they noted.

Wayne Schrader, the vegetable and strawberry adviser for the University of California Cooperative Extension office in San Diego, said the cold’s toll will be the fruit that otherwise would have been ready for harvest in about 30 days. Now, the plants--which themselves survived the cold--will have to start another cycle of flowering, setting back the initial harvest to late February at the soonest.

San Diego’s January crop usually ties with Mexico’s strawberry crop as the first to hit the markets, and those early strawberries fetch San Diego growers upwards of $20 per tray, five times or more than the prices that strawberries bring growers in April and May, said Mark Murai, whose 130 acres of strawberries in the San Luis Rey Valley of eastern Oceanside account for about 10% of the county’s total strawberry crop.

“Ninety-eight percent of our early bloom is gone, and that’s our most profitable crop since they’re the first strawberries of the season,” he said.

Mexico Competition

Since strawberries grown in Mexico also ripen in January, they will now control the local market if they escaped the same cold that struck San Diego, said Schrader.

“The Mexico production is in direct competition to ours, and I don’t know how much damage, if any, they received. If everybody got the same amount of damage, it will simply set back early production by about a month,” he said.

“But if Mexico wasn’t affected, then our local growers have lost that very important marketing window and they’ll sustain an economic loss,” he said.

Shigehara of the weather service said cold temperatures are expected again later this week, but they should not be as low as last week’s. “We can look for frost to develop again, but it won’t be as damaging,” he said.

“And we still have January, so we have to keep our guard up,” he said.

Of the current cold wave, he joked: “It should make the people coming down from Wyoming and Iowa (for Wednesday’s Holiday Bowl) feel right at home. It shows them how we in San Diego will go to any extreme to make them feel comfortable.”