Navigating Drought, Freezes, and Repercussions of 100% Fruit Loss for Western Slope Orchards As we saw across Colorado and the West, it was a wild “winter” with historically high temperatures and abysmally low snowpack. This, in turn, means very little water for farms to irrigate crops, and many rural farmers are forced to leave fields fallow this year. Thankfully, Denver Water (the state’s largest water utility) announced water restrictions in March, but given that about half of their water demand has historically been for outdoor lawn irrigation in a climate where traditional turfgrass is not sustainable, we still have a long way to go for urban consumers to reduce their environmental footprint. Denver friends, check out Denver Water’s handy guide for re-doing your landscape to tread more lightly on the planet! And in your veggie gardens, use drip irrigation, mulch, shade cloth, and timers to water overnight when your plants are least stressed and have the best water uptake. USGS is warning we will soon no longer call this a drought, which is by definition temporary, and instead are seeing aridification of the Colorado River Basin—so let’s all do our part to conserve our precious water resources. With the unseasonably warm winter, plants broke dormancy incredibly early (we saw fruit trees blooming in Denver in February!). Unfortunately, similar patterns were true on the Western Slope, and orchards in Delta County experienced a devastating, never-before-seen 100% loss of their crop. With fruit trees blooming several weeks early, a freeze on April 17th with temperatures in the low 20’s wiped out all of the developing fruit buds. To learn more about the impact to these farms and their workers, watch this video featuring our long-time fruit partners:
Behind the Scenes with Colorado Fruit Farmers After a Spring Freeze Led to 100% Crop Loss. And if you would like to help Ela Family Farms during this unprecedented loss of revenue on their 100-year-old, 5th generation farm, we encourage you to visit this page of the Ela website to support how you can :) There will still be some Colorado fruit (from lower elevations) to shop for this year, although it will be in high demand! Check out your local farmers markets, and you can also find it through our fruit CSA share. We are all in this together, and we at Sprout City Farms thank you for supporting local agriculture through the ups and downs of producing food in our incredibly challenging climate!!
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