Imagine: It’s been spring for a while, quite balmy weather, and all of a sudden one night the temperature drops. You drive to the bakery, everything seems normal except that it is colder than the days before, and then you come across this:

This is an espalier fruit (apple trees) field. The plants, the blooms are covered in ice. On the ground lies frost. But it ends abruptly at the fence and the flowering bushes around are frost free.

Turns out this is an ingenious way to use irrigation. Ice, it turns out, protects the blooms and hence the possibility of them developing into fruit.

Ice covers the twigs, the blooms, the new leaves.

FOWC with Fandango: Irrigation

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