{"id":66980,"date":"2024-03-13T06:21:16","date_gmt":"2024-03-13T11:21:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=66980"},"modified":"2024-03-13T06:21:16","modified_gmt":"2024-03-13T11:21:16","slug":"fruit-chaos-is-coming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=66980","title":{"rendered":"Fruit Chaos Is Coming"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Fruit Chaos Is Coming<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
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Climate change is threatening to turn sublime summer stone fruits disgusting, or rob us of their pleasures entirely.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\"A<\/picture><\/div>
Illustration by Paul Spella \/ The Atlantic. Source: Getty.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n
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Summer, to me, is all about stone fruit: dark-purple plums, peaches you can smell from three feet away. But last summer, I struggled to find peaches at the farmers\u2019 markets in New York City. A freak deep freeze in February had taken them out across New York State and other parts of the Northeast, buds shriveling on the branch as temperatures plummeted below zero and a\u00a0brutally cold, dry wind<\/a>\u00a0swept through the region.<\/p>\n

The loss was severe. One farmer estimated that the Hudson Valley lost\u00a090 percent<\/a>\u00a0of its stone fruit. Evan Lentz, a faculty member in the plant-science department at the University of Connecticut, told me his state lost 50 to 75 percent. Another freeze in the second half of May damaged lots of other crops, including strawberries and blueberries. In New Hampshire,\u00a0apple growers<\/a>\u00a0who went to bed with orchards full of pink blossoms awoke to petals turning brown. Georgia, the iconic peach state,\u00a0lost<\/a>\u00a0some 90 percent of last year\u2019s crop\u2014a Georgia summer without peaches, an unfathomable thing. An unusually warm winter robbed the trees of the period of cold they need to bloom in the spring. The buds that did emerge were, like the ones in the Northeast, killed by a cold snap in the early spring.<\/p>\n

Fruit trees evolved to live in more stable conditions; they\u2019re exquisitely well adapted to the rhythm of a usual year. But instead of reliable seasons, they\u2019re getting weather chaos: Springtime, already somewhat of a wild-card season, \u201cis getting more and more erratic,\u201d Theodore DeJong, a fruit-tree physiologist at UC Davis, told me. As a result, trees\u2019 sense of seasonality is scrambled. And instead of reliable peaches and plums, we\u2019re getting fruit chaos. It may not happen every year, but it\u2019s happening more frequently.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest\u2026<\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fruit Chaos Is Coming Climate change is threatening to turn sublime summer stone fruits disgusting, or rob us of their pleasures entirely. Illustration by Paul Spella \/ The Atlantic. Source: Getty. Summer, to me, is all about stone fruit: dark-purple plums, peaches you can smell from three feet away. But last summer, I struggled to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7],"tags":[141,17118,8301,34170],"class_list":["post-66980","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-survival-2","tag-climate-change","tag-fruit-trees","tag-the-atlantic","tag-zoe-schlanger"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66980","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=66980"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66980\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66981,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66980\/revisions\/66981"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=66980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=66980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=66980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}