The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Summer has arrived in the Carpathians with all its glory.

We are glad that this unusually capricious past spring is over.

Most of the oak seedlings growing on the Ciomad Mountain planting site (our most documented one) are nice and growing,

but a part of them are really weak, with dried and just regrowing leaves. These are the seedlings which were frozen (yes, frozen) on May 12, when in the valleys of the Eastern Carpathians the temperature was well below 0 degrees for a night. This was the coldest night in May since 1975.

These freeze-damaged trees are the ones that opened their leaves relatively late, and the freezing wind found them with delicate, freshly opened leaves. These are the seedlings that were planted among slightly unfavorable environmental micro-conditions — like waterlogged places or locations exposed to western winds (the usual direction from where the időjárási frontok are approaching).

The timing of leaf-opening is a risky calculation for deciduous trees growing in areas where late frost can damage the newly formed leaves.

They are “calculating” the optimal time based on the number of sufficiently warm days of spring and the length of the days. This year, the last snow fell at the beginning of April. And the last hard frost happened extremely late — in the middle of May. So the late forming of leaves was not the fault of these seedlings.

Fortunately, until now the spring was also very wet, with a lot of rain — this gave the seedlings a lifeline— they had and have the time to form new leaves, and hopefully they can also grow during the summer.