NORTH LIBERTY, Ind. -- While the stretch of hot, sunny weather is great for picking strawberries, the warmer than average and wetter than average conditions of the past three months have definitely impacted the crops growth.
“We've had a lot of problems with the rain, the frost, and then now it's a rain issue.”
Joe Ziegler, owner of Ziegler’s U-Pick Strawberries, says the strawberry crop this year may have been stunted thanks to warmer temperatures earlier into the growing season.
“What happens with strawberries is when you get to the 80 degrees, they kind of stop growing and start turning red, so what we need is like 70s and rain every day, you know. Then we'll have bumper crops, but you know it's farming, so you know we kind of just take what we get.”
Overall, the crop is still robust, if not a tad earlier than some previous years.
"We used to start two weeks from now when I started, but it's every year, it's two or three days earlier every year...And then when it does that, it pushes you into the frost barrier, you know, that the time of the frost, that they're flowering even earlier than what they normally would, and we wouldn't have to deal with that”
The last day Michiana saw below freezing temperatures was in mid-May, right in the middle of the blooming season for strawberries
“We hit that 29 degrees when we were in full flower, and that's quite a problem, because now we have to keep everything from freezing, so we have to, we run water constantly until the temperature gets above 32 and I mean, we have, we had icicles hanging off these plants, so, but we saved them.”
Ziegler says larger productions in Michiana likely didn’t see a drastic decrease in yield of strawberries this year thanks to their sprinkler system.
“If you didn't have overhead irrigation, you would have lost your whole crop. Yeah, absolutely, you wouldn't have been able to save a bit of it.”
If you lost your strawberry crop at home due to the late frost, Brieanna Slonaker, from the Marshall County Purdue Extension Office has this to say:
“Looking forward to next year here in 2027, make sure you watch the weather. There are steps that you can take for your home backyards with that, whether that's covering up with sheets, plastic, whatever, to make sure that that frost doesn't touch that out in the fields.”