TRAFALGAR, Ind. — We hit the 80s in central Indiana on Tuesday, just a week after dealing with late spring snow and bitter cold.
That hurt a lot of backyard flowers and gardens, but it really put the freeze on local apple crops at area orchards.
Sarah Brown has spent the past few days walking all 24 acres of The Apple Works in Trafalgar, magnifying glass and knife in hand, inspecting each of the orchard's 10,000 apple trees.
"I'm taking every block by block and putting my analysis down on paper," Brown said. "This is the king bloom. Now I'm going to slice this and see if that center is still green or if it's brown, and look it's nice and green. That's a good thing. That means the pistil is alive."
She's assessing the damage from last week's late freeze - and there is a lot of damage.
"This is shot. All this is just gone, gone, gone, gone, gone," Brown said, pointing out blooms that were lost to the freeze. "This might be black on the inside we'll see. That might not have made it. Yep, that's dead. See? That's dead on the inside. So we're counting on these late blooms to give us a crop."
The delicate blooms are in a critical stage right now, in need of pollination and susceptible to temperature changes.
Every tenth of a degree can make a difference. Brown said the snow and cold wiped out 70% of her apple crop.
That's on top of losing her entire crop last year, like most Indiana orchards, from a freeze in May.
During the first freeze this spring, Brown got creative and spent a lot of cash renting a chopper to push warmer air down to the ground.
She got the idea from Oliver Winery, which used a helicopter to save its grapes during a freeze several years ago.
"He started at 3:00 in the morning because that's when we hit the danger zone and we talked him into staying until 8:30," Brown explained.
Now, to save the blooms that remain, she has to hope the bees do their work and that BroodX cicadas this summer don't destroy the tree limbs. They can be devastating to fruit trees and The Apple Works' location is right in the hot spot for the 17-year cicada brood.
This job takes a strong stomach, with so much out of apple growers' control.
"I don't think the average person realizes what we go through," Brown said. "Every year we sweat it out."
All so we can enjoy the delicious fruits of her labor.
"We're not out of the woods by any shape of the imagination, so we're just going to wait and see, keep our fingers crossed," Brown said. "Yep, we don't have to go to a casino to gamble and we're pretty much praying all the time!"