A deep spring freeze wiped out several peach crops in the North Fork Valley this month, though other fruit growers on Colorado’s Western Slope said their orchards made it through unscathed and will have early harvests this season.
Boulder County Farmers Market officials set off a storm of concern on Thursday morning after announcing on social media that three of the five fruit growers that frequent the market had reported total crop losses, including Topp Fruits, Ela Family Farms and an unidentified third grower.
But growers and sellers told The Denver Post on Thursday that while orchards in the North Fork Valley — including those near Cedaredge, Hotchkiss and Paonia — were hit hard by the late freeze, Palisade was largely untouched.
Clare Talbott of in Palisade said most of the farm’s 120 acres of peaches, apples, pears, cherries and apricots are in good shape and will have early harvests this year because of the warm winter.
“Palisade is looking okay, as long as we can get the water,” she said.
The harvest outlook for the 150 acres of peach, pear, apricot and cherry trees on is “so far, so good,” owner and managing partner Chris Schmalz said.
“We’ve had enough water to irrigate everything, and it looks like we’re going to be able to get by this season with the irrigation situation, which is always in the back of our mind,” he said.
Mike Scofield, who sells Colorado produce at , said he spoke to two Palisade growers on Thursday who both said their fruit crops were looking good.
“I don’t know who started the rumor bug, but I talked to growers in Palisade, and Palisade is in good shape,” Scofield said.
was not as lucky.
After spending the night of April 17 fighting a losing battle to save his crops from a late-season deep freeze, farmer Harrison Topp had nothing left in him as he trudged to a nearby coffee shop.
Topp said he ran around his orchards trying to keep fires going and warm air blowing as temperatures dropped, threatening — and ultimately wiping out — his entire season of fruit crops. Topp said he lost everything in just one night: peaches, apples, pears, plums, berries, nectarines and table grapes.
“It’s like a different reality than we’ve ever lived in before,” Topp said.
April freezes are no strangers to Colorado’s Western Slope, but Topp said he’s never seen this level of destruction. The trees will survive to grow another season, but several farms in the area are left without fruit to sell this year.
“Not wanting to cry wolf, we checked and checked again,” Hotchkiss-based Ela Family Farms . “We have found no live fruits after the precipitous freeze that happened a week and a half ago. It appears that the 2026 Ela fruit crop is lost.”
Steve Ela, a fourth-generation grower who has been working full-time on the farm for 36 years, said he’d never seen this level of damage.
Freezes aren’t uncommon in April, but temperatures tend to stay in the high 20s, Ela said. On that night, temperatures dropped to 21 degrees at his farm, damaging the sensitive fruit buds that had already bloomed after an abnormally warm and dry winter.
The blooms were weeks ahead of schedule, Ela said. They normally emerge close to April 14, but he first spotted them this year on March 20.
“You have one chance at it in this business,” Ela said. “If you don’t get it, you have to wait for next year.”
Ela said he supplied the fruit orchards with strengthening minerals, like calcium, as the cold front approached. When the freezing weather arrived, 11 propane-powered giant wind fans ran all night to raise temperatures in the orchard.
But it was too cold for too long, Ela said. The orchard has battled spring freezes in previous years, but some fruit always survives, he said. Not this year.
“Everybody I’ve talked to in Delta County is in the same boat,” Ela said. “I haven’t heard from anyone in this area that has a crop. … It’s gonna be a long year.”
Topp and his crew were out assessing the buds the day after the freeze.
“At the time, it was really hard to tell,” he said. “The vibe was bad, but it looked like some areas might be able to pull through.”
A few days later, a comprehensive assessment involving thousands of samples from Topp’s various crops revealed the worst had come to pass: “There wasn’t a single viable crop that had fruit in it,” Topp said.
“At that point, I figured we were pretty well cooked,” he added.
Some of the worst freezes of years past have wiped out roughly 70% of Topp’s fruit harvest, the man said. But the remaining 30% was enough to scrape by on. This year, crop insurance will allow the farm to stay open another season, but it won’t cover the cost of workers, who will have to be laid off, Topp said.
The other two farms that frequently sell at the Boulder County Farmers Market managed to scrape by and will have at least some fruit to harvest, according to organizers.
“Freezing temperatures in April aren’t out of the ordinary for the Western Slope,” . “But when you have an unseasonably warm winter and spring followed by a weekend of freezing temperatures, the results can be devastating. … Peaches, cherries, apricots, apples, plums and pears… all gone.”
The abnormally warm winter meant fruit was far ahead of schedule, leaving it more vulnerable to the cold weather, market officials said. The loss comes despite farmers’ best efforts to protect their crops, working through the night to protect the fruit from the cold.
“We hope that every time you bite into a peach this summer, you feel what we are feeling now — that every piece of fruit that we get to enjoy is a miracle, which depends on a hundred tiny things going right in order to make its way to our hands and mouths,” market officials said. “Some years, miracles simply don’t happen.”
Topp said he hopes the crop loss doesn’t force any farms to close and that the supply chain remains intact before he can return to action in 2027. His goal is to spend the year on projects and renovations he didn’t have time for when actively growing fruit and to come back “stronger than ever.”
“This is a once-in-a-generation type of event, so we’re learning how to move through it day by day,” Topp said.
For the fruit growers who made it through the spring without major crop loss, the warmer-than-usual winter could mean early harvests. C + R Farms is anticipating cherries by June 15, early clingstone peaches around June 25 and apricots at the end of June or early July, Talbott said.
