Understanding Chill Hours

Understanding Chill Hours

Any North Florida resident who has tried their hand at growing apples, peaches, or plums may occasionally find themselves frustrated by a year (or two…or three) with a poor or nonexistent harvest. What has gone wrong? Are the trees getting a disease? Were they not fertilized properly?

It may be that the tree owner has done everything correctly, but the weather is actually to blame. The answer to “what has gone wrong?” may lie with a concept called “chill hours”. Plants that are adapted to living in colder climates need some way to figure out when the winter is over. If a plant starts blooming too early, it’s likely that a frost will come along and knock out this year’s flowers. No flowers, no fruit. For a plant, this means no little baby plants this year to keep the species going. To avoid this, some plants have figured out a way to detect and keep track of how cold it’s been in a particular year. When enough hours of cold weather have accumulated, that’s usually a safe signal that spring must be near. This means it’s time to blossom when the weather next warms up.

Usually. Different varieties of plants are adapted to blossom at different times of year, depending on the average amount of cold weather the area they live in gets each year. A plant from a colder climate might not start growing flowers until it has detected 1,000 hours of cold…or more! Given that the temperature range that counts as a chill hour is around 32-45 degrees Fahrenheit, you might correctly guess that such varieties will NOT do well in Florida. In north Florida, we receive somewhere from 500-700 chill hours each year. This winter (as of February, 2023), we have received 479 chill hours in Walton County.

Chill hour total for Walton County, as of Feb 1, 2023

That’s not a lot, and we may not get much more weather that plants recognize as cold enough to count. Apple growers with varieties that need even as few as 500 chill hours may not be making many pies this year. So what can be done?

First, temper your expectations. Understand that even though we may get the occasional hard freeze, it may not count any more toward the chill hour requirement than temperatures just above freezing. Then, when it warms up the following week, those 70 degree temperatures may actually set BACK the chill hour clock for some plants.

Second, choose varieties that require few chill hours in the first place. A ‘Honeycrisp’ apple, needing 800-1000 chill hours each year, is probably never going to produce fruit in the panhandle of Florida. Other apple varieties might, though! Try varieties such as ‘Anna’ (which needs only 300 chill hours), ‘Dorsett Golden’ (250 hours), or ‘Tropic Sweet’ (300 hours). For peaches, try varieties like ‘GulfAtlas’, ‘Gulfcrimson’, or ‘Gulfsnow’ (400 hours each).

Third, consider learning to love other types of fresh fruit. Persimmons, figs, kumquats, and loquats may not show up very often in treasured family recipes, but they can offer a tasty alternative to plants that simply might not be well adapted to our climate.

Peaches are popular, but they may not produce fruit every year!

For more information, try these links:

To calculate how many chill hours your specific area has received, check out the tool at agroclimate.org.

For information on apples, peaches, plums, blueberries, or other fruits, try our EDIS publications on each.

You can also, of course, contact your local Extension office for help as well!

Evan Anderson

Walton County Horticulture Agent

Chill Hours:  What Are They and Why Do They Matter?

Chill Hours: What Are They and Why Do They Matter?

For being in a place known as the Sunshine State, the Panhandle has been mighty cold and dreary to start 2022!  With all the recent bitterly cold weather that’s rolled through our neck of the woods over the last month or so, you may be asking yourself “Is this just a typical Panhandle winter or has it been colder than normal and what is the impact of freezing weather on my fruit trees?”  The answer might surprise you!

The easiest way to measure cold and its impact on plants is through a unit of measurement known as a “chill hour”.  In its simplest iteration, a chill hour is an hour of time during which the thermometer dips below 45 degrees F.  These “chilling hours” are vital to agriculture and our native ecosystems because many plants, especially those that produce fruit like pears, blueberries, peaches, and even citrus, require a certain amount of chill to enter dormancy and develop flower buds for the following spring.  All fruit trees have a minimum chilling requirement to initiate flowering depending on variety and too few chilling hours equals poor to no fruit the following year.  Too little cold can be just as harmful as too much!

Blueberry beginning to flower after receiving adequate chill hours. Photo courtesy of Daniel Leonard.

Now that we know about chilling hours, the question remains, is this a normal winter or has it been colder than normal?  The answer is neither.  Based on historical average data from the UF/IFAS weather station in Marianna (a central location in the Panhandle and a good proxy for your local temperatures), as cold as we’ve been in January and early February, we’re still lagging the historical average with respect to chilling hours, and therefore to total cold temperatures.  As of February 6th, 512 chill hours had been recorded this winter.  This seems like a lot until you check and see that we had 554 chill hours on the same day last year and the historic average is more than 750!  Though January and February have indeed been cold this year, the chill hour graph indicates that over the last few years it’s taken longer into the calendar to achieve our first chill hour and that cold weather isn’t pushing as far into spring as it historically has.

There are many potential explanations for the warming trend in the Panhandle but regardless of your preferred theory, backyard fruit growers need to adapt to deal with the change in chill.  The primary way to combat fewer chill hours is to evaluate your current fruiting plants and think about replacing high-chill varieties that no longer produce well with lower-chill varieties.  If you know the variety you have, look up the number of chill hours that variety requires.  If it’s an older variety that requires near the historical chill average or more, you may consider replacing it with a newer variety that requires fewer chilling hours.  For example, the popular old blueberry variety ‘TifBlue’ requires 600-700 chilling hours.  For most of the previous decade, we have either just barely or not reached that many chill hours, leading to a low fruit set.  Replacing ‘TifBlue’ with a newer, lower chill variety like ‘Powderblue’ will probably increase your blueberry production.  If you don’t know what variety of fruit tree or shrub you have, just observe the flowering period over the next spring or two.  If it doesn’t flower at all or flowers sporadically and you don’t make a good fruit yield, a high chill requirement very likely could be to blame and replacing it could enhance production!

Though we’ve had an intensely cold start to 2022, if current trends continue, this wintry weather will most likely play out before we reach historic averages.  That doesn’t mean you can’t grow plenty of backyard fruit, it just requires adapting to the times with lower chill varieties!  To keep up with chill hour accumulation, visit http://agroclimate.org/tools/chill-hours-calculator and if you have any questions about fruiting plant variety selection, chilling hours and their effect on plants, or any other horticultural topic, contact your local UF/IFAS County Extension office!  Stay warm and happy gardening!

 

Cold Weather is a Good Thing for Fruit Trees

Cold Weather is a Good Thing for Fruit Trees

We may be suffering from the recent low temperatures, but temperate fruit trees such as peaches and apples require a period of cold weather in order to become cold hardy and produce a good crop.

What is Cold Hardiness?

Cold hardiness is the ability of a plant to survive low temperatures.  However, every cold event is fairly unique with variables such as when the low temperatures occur (early vs. late winter), how quickly the temperature drops, the temperatures in the days leading up to the event, and the length of time the low temperatures are sustained.

Cold Acclimation

Cold acclimation is the development of freezing tolerance in plants.  Three fall environmental factors contribute to cold acclimation in fruit trees.  Plant will develop 10 to 15 degrees of cold tolerance when the leaves sense shorter day lengths.  Metabolic activity is increased when days are short and temperatures are between 60°F days and 40°F nights.  The second factor occurs when lows reach the 20s, which can make trees up to 10 degrees hardier.  The final factor occurs when temperatures dip to near zero, which fortunately for us does not occur very often.

Trees remain hardy during the winter as long as temperatures remain fairly stable.  However, de-acclimation occurs in reaction to warm temperatures.  This explains the winter flowering which occurred this past December.  A cold snap may not injure trees unless it immediately follows a period of mild temperatures.

Florida Average Chill Hours Map

Florida Average Chill Hours Map – UF/IFAS Extension

Chilling Requirement

The cold weather and gradual cold acclimation are necessary to a tree’s accumulation of chill hours which is necessary for steady fruit yields.  Chill hours are the accumulation of hours when temperatures are between 32°F and 45°F.  The yearly average chill hour accumulation in Northwest Florida is between 660 and 700 hours.  The apple varieties recommended for our area (‘Anna’, ‘Dorsett Golden’, and ‘TropicSweet’) have a chilling requirement of 250 to 300 hours.  Some of the peach varieties recommended for our area (‘Flordacreast’, ‘Flordaking’, and ‘Gulfsnow’) have a chilling requirement of 350 to 400 hours.  Please note the risk of planting these varieties because their chilling requirements are lower than our average chill hour accumulation.  The varieties listed are for example, but other available varieties are suitable for our area.

Whether you like winter weather or not, just remember the satisfaction of eating fresh fruit in the summer.  To track this year’s chill hours from the warmth of your home, please visit the AgroClimate tool at http://agroclimate.org/tools/Chill-Hours-Calculator/.