Poor growing weather this year is apparently the cause of the local J.Q. Fruit Farm and Orchard having an approximately 75 percent drop in saleable blueberries and losing more than 25 of its mature apple trees to a blight.

Dan and Carol Whitcomb own the business north of Princeton city limits. Besides raspberries, it has 6 acres of blueberry plants and a little more than 4 acres of apple trees. The Whitcombs rely on the business for much of their livelihood.

Carol Whitcomb talked about their situation last week.

“It wasn’t just the wetness, but the long winter that affected the blueberries,” she began. The extended cold spring caused an absence of blueberries on the upper portions of the blueberry plants, where the snow wasn’t providing insulation, she said.

The cooler nights during much of the summer so far this year have not been good for ripening the blueberries, and nights are when a lot of the ripening process occurs, she explained. Carol Whitcomb mentioned a radio weather broadcaster stating there had been a “polar vortex” in mid-July this year that brought cooler than normal temperatures for that time of year.

The Whitcombs are longtime members of the Princeton-Zimmerman Farmers Market Association, and Carol Whitcomb said she has talked to other members and found that some have had an extra fuel expense heating greenhouses in the spring when the weather continued cool.

“The weather affected a lot of people,” she said.

Carol Whitcomb noted that their raspberry crop is good this year, but also said that good fortune will not be enough to make up for their loss in the blueberry and the apple crops.

She mentioned two other downsides because of the weather’s effect this year on their business: They did not have enough blueberries to sell to their wholesale customers, and they had to let some employees go early this year. Whitcomb called it a “trickle-down effect.”

Each growing year is different in Minnesota and “this year is more extreme,” she added. She characterized the year as being one of the worst she has known for growers. “We’ve had some years of no blueberries, but at least we had a decent crop of apples,” she said.

Source - http://www.freshplaza.com/