Frost and cold temperature impacts on local farms

March 17, 2023

Celeste Smith,

BRUNSWICK COUNTY, NC (WWAY) –An Ocean Isle Beach farm spoke with WWAY about the impacts this week’s frost had on some of its crops.

Lauren Gore, owner of Huckleberry Farm, said thanks to preparations made ahead of the frost, they only saw damage to one crop.

Gore says Huckleberry Farm’s biggest-selling crop is flowers. While they fared very well, their blueberry bushes took the hardest hit from the frost. She says they’re not sure the full extent of the damage yet, but expects the bushes will still produce some blueberries this year.

A lot of blueberry farms will spray their blueberries with water, to kind of freeze it and protect the blooms from the frost. We do have irrigation, but we weren’t able to, because if we turned on the irrigation it would have gotten the flowers wet too, which was not something that we wanted to do. So, for our blueberries we checked them and we got a little bit of damage, it’s kind of hard to tell at this point. There’s a few of them that turned brown in there, and I could tell some of them were damaged and fallen off,” said Lauren Gore, Huckleberry Farm owner.

Gore says they have kept warm season plants in their greenhouse, away from the rapidly changing temperatures, and have been growing flowers that fare well in cooler temperatures in their fields.

She said this year, their flowers bloomed 3 to 4 weeks earlier, and they having to adapt each year to challenges presented by frequent weather changes

“Going forward, we don’t really know if that’s going to continue all summer long, or if we have a cold spell –then is there going to be a gap between the cool weather things and the warm weather things. So, it’s just, it’s kind of a game of mother nature, and every year you just learn from it and do your best to adapt for the next year,” said Gore.

Earlier this week, WWAY spoke with Lewis Farms in Rocky Point, about their preparations for the frost. They say it appears their preparations were successful, and they saw minimum damage from the cold.