Georgia’s freaky freezing temperatures haven’t hurt the
state’s
blueberry crop yet. But if warm weather arrives soon, it could
set up this year’s blueberry crop for significant freeze damage
later.

"I don’t think the cold weather has hurt the blueberry
crop so far, but it’s sure setting us up for a dangerous
situation,"
said Scott NeSmith, a research horticulturist with the University
of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.
"Right now, the blueberries have received more chill hours
than they need at this point in the season."

They’ve Gotta Have the Cold

Blueberry plants need cold weather to produce blooms and then
fruit. This cold weather requirement is called chill hours. Once
the plant gets the required number of chill hours, it’s ready
to break bud and produce blooms.

"If the weather warms up now, the plants are really going
to start blooming fast and this sets up a danger for possible
freeze damage later," NeSmith said. "So if we go
through
two weeks of warm weather, we run the danger of getting early
bloom before the frost damage is over."

NeSmith said Georgia blueberry growers faced the opposite
problem
last year.

"In 1999, we had a record lack of chill hours, just 200,
for the first week of January," he said. "The plants
weren’t getting the chill hours they needed to bloom adequately.
This was a very low number of chill hours compared to the
historical
number of 400 chill hours for the same time of year."

Today, NeSmith keeps a close eye on the number of chill hours
using data from UGA’s Georgia Automated Environmental Monitoring
Network website <http://www.griffin.peachnet.edu/bae/>.

Too Many Chill Hours

"Here in Spalding County, we have normally accumulated
400 to 500 chill hours at this time of year," he said.
"But
this year, we already have more than 900 chill hours, which is
about a 40 percent increase in chilling."

NeSmith says having too many chill hours is rarely a problem.
"This only happens five to 10 percent of the time,"
he said. "It’s almost unheard of for us to have this
problem."

The largest concentration of commercial blueberry orchards
in Georgia is located in the southeastern corner in Appling,
Bacon,
Clinch, Pierce and Ware counties, with additional growers
sprinkled
across the state. Georgia ranks third in the nation in blueberry
production with more than 4,500 acres.

NeSmith and other UGA horticulturists plan to share their
concerns
with Georgia blueberry growers during the Georgia Fruit and
Vegetable
Conference set for this weekend in Savannah.

"It’s a very scary situation because winter has been
shifted
back," he said. "It’s not any one cold event we’ve
faced
that has caused this dilemma. It’s the amount of total cold
weather
we’ve been having. The cold hasn’t hurt us so far, but it sure
has put us in a precarious position."