>La Grande Observer | Union and Wallowa Counties' News Leader

Bundle up, and don’t forget those tender spring seedlings.

The National Weather Service in Pendleton is forecasting that overnight temperatures tonight and Saturday will hit the low- to mid-20s with a 30 to 40 percent chance of snow. The really bad news is that this winterlike blast could last through Tuesday.

Darrin Walenta, the county’s Extension agronomist, says field crops should be OK. With the extended cold weather the region has been been experiencing, Walenta says everything is pretty much suspended — a good spot to be in with a cold snap like this moving in.

“There are no sugar beets or potatoes in the ground, yet. Winter wheat should be fine, barley might get nipped back a little if it gets really cold — any of the cereal grains could. But they’ll come out of it,” he says.

At Gilstrap Brothers Winery in Cove, where the growing season is later, the buds are just starting to form and should also be fine.

“If it was June when the buds are a couple of inches long and we were expecting temperatures in the mid-20s, we’d be worried,” said Warren Gilstrap. “But unless it gets down to zero, we should be OK.”

The hybrid grape vines, he says, are bred for higher elevations and cooler temperatures.

“By design, we’ve already minimized some of the risk,” he says.

But for other fruit growers, like John Miller of Miller Cherry Orchards in Cove, anticipating a winter cold spell like this in mid-April is a definite concern.

The kind of weather coming in, he says, can kill the flower pistil, which is where the fruit eventually develops.

“As the temperature drops, the number of kills increases,” Miller says. But Miller also says the extended cool weather has played to his favor as well, and the trees are a little behind in their development.

“We haven’t broken bud yet, so we are a little protected. But if the temperature gets down into the teens, the damage could still be substantial,” he says.

Miller Orchards does not use smudge pots. And although he looked into the wind machines used extensively by many of the large cherry operations in the western part of Oregon or in the Yakima area, it didn’t pencil out.

“Each machine costs $22,000 and covers about 10 acres. So for our 150 acres, we’d have an investment of $220,000 to $250,000. It just doesn’t make sense for something we might use once a year,” he says.

So this weekend, Miller says, he’ll be walking the orchard, keeping an eye on things and keeping his fingers crossed.