COCAGNE, N.B. -- It's the final day of the you-pick season in Cocagne, N.B. and farmers say the pickings are slim.
Euclide Bourgeois says they’re lucky to have 25 per cent of their crop after being hit with a late frost this spring.
“The inside of the fruit froze too hard and it froze the seeds right out, so the fruit is like a shell with no seeds,” says Bourgeois.
Bourgeois grows a wide variety of fruits and vegetables and he says almost all of his crops were decimated by the frost except for the peaches, some late season apples, and strawberries which he managed to save by freezing the field.
“We have an irrigation system that sprinkles water over the whole field and as it freezes it creates a blanket of ice and under that the blossom and the strawberry remain right around zero. What you need for damage is -1, -1.2,” he says.
But farmers say this isn’t the only cause of poor crops this year.
Two days prior to the frost, farmers were seeing unseasonably warm temperatures reaching up to 30 degrees. This sped up the development of any blossoms, making them more susceptible to the coming frost.
While the spring temperature dip affected farmers from northern New Brunswick to Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley, not everybody within that zone was affected.
Half an hour away, Verger Belliveau orchard in Memramcook, N.B was barely touched by the early June frost.
“Some blocks we had yields that were probably down 10, 15 per cent but this is also a year where some of our younger blocks were starting to increase in production so overall it kept our production where we needed it to be," said farmer Guy Gautreau.
He considers himself lucky.
"I guess farming is always a combination of factors you can control and others you can't like specific temperatures. We might of been lucky that evening with nice air currents or something that made the difference between losing flowers and not losing them," Gautreau said.
Farmers hope this saeson's losses will lead to a bumper crop next year.
With files from CTV Atlantic’s Jonathan MacInnis
