(post from February 2017) Well as most of you in South Georgia already know, we’ve basically gone from Fall to Spring as Winter forgot to show up this year! That’s great for strawberries b/c as long as we frost protected the few nights we did have cold weather, we were able to go ahead and open the U-Pick fields in January! That’s a first for our 19 year old strawberry farm. So what does this mean for the rest of the season? We don’t actually know! Right now the amount of blooms we’re seeing (it takes 30 days for a bloom to become a ripe berry) it looks like we might peak in March instead of April, but hopefully we will still have strawberries until May, they just might not be as plentiful. We really won’t know until we get further into the season. And as usual in farming, what one crop needs another doesn’t so this warm winter also probably means little or no peach crop for our farm. Peaches and nectarines have to have a certain amount of chill hours in the winter and we just haven’t had the winter for a big peach crop. Peach trees lose their leaves and go through a dormant period in the Fall, which gives them a rest. They have to have this rest for the buds that were set the previous summer or else they can’t bloom. But, let’s not worry about that until peach season! Right now we have gorgeous, sweet strawberries waiting to be picked! We’ve fired up the ice cream and slushie machines (actually we never shut them down except one day that it was 30 degrees!). The playground is open with some new additions and we have a new shaded area that we created out of an old barn on the farm. As always, with the exception of a few swings, our playground is totally recycled! Check out our Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat accounts for the most up-to-date info on the farm!
