Freeze ended Lowcountry winter harvest. Did the strawberries survive?
The bout of arctic air and snow that descended on the Lowcountry and lingered for days during first week of the year have ended the harvest of winter crops at St. Helena Island’s Dempsey Farms and Barefoot Farm.
The owners of both farms said on Friday that they expect to recover in time for the spring harvest, and the owner of Dempsey Farms said his popular spring u-pick strawberry patch survived and should be ready for picking by the beginning of April.
Jacky Frazier, owner of Barefoot Farm, reported that the sale of winter produce at his stand has ended, due to unsellable, cold-burnt plants.
This is not a typical occurrence of past winters, he said, as the early-January freeze was deeper and longer lasting than in typical years.
Though his winter harvest has ended, Frazier said that his spring crop was unplanted, and thus unaffected.
Similarly, further down Sea Island Parkway at Dempsey Farms, owner Davis Dempsey said the freeze put an end to the farm’s winter harvest of lettuce and collards, killing the red and Romaine lettuce plants and leaving the collards alive, but frost burnt and unsellable. He said he and his son, Davey, tried to harvest as much of the remaining crop as he could before the freeze arrived.
He said the farm also lost two bee hives to the cold, though two other hives survived and appear fine.
This comes after the farm lost its fall crop for the second year in the row, first to Hurricane Matthew in October 2016 and then to Tropical Storm Irma in September. Pumpkins, cucumbers and sweet corn were all drowned by the rains from Irma. “We didn’t even open the u pick patch this fall,” he said.
“You just learn to cope with it when you’re a farmer,” said Dempsey, whose been in the business for 56 years. “You have your good years and your bad years.”
He said that the farm’s spring crop of strawberries had been planted before the freeze, but appears to have survived with little damage. The main threat to the crop is hungry deer attracted to the field because there is little else green to eat right now, he said. This prompted him to put up a temporary electric fence around the stawberries to stem the deer depredation.
“Hopefully we’ll have some strawberries,” he said, “that will be about the middle of March or the first of April, depending on the weather.”
Jay Karr: 843-706-8150
This story was originally published January 22, 2018 at 12:33 PM with the headline "Freeze ended Lowcountry winter harvest. Did the strawberries survive?."