‘Pretty impactful’: SC farm delays strawberry picking after hail storm
YORK COUNTY (QUEEN CITY NEWS) — It was almost time for the strawberries at Black’s Peaches to be picked — but last Saturday’s heavy hail storm had other plans.
“It looked like somebody took a weed eater to our strawberry patches and just went through it like ‘Hey, let’s cut these down and we’ll see if they’ll grow back,'” said Christopher Black, the son of the family-owned farm.
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Rows and rows of fresh, bright red strawberries were crushed by hail destroying the farm’s September crops.
“It was pretty devastating when you first see it and you come across it because they were… they were as beautiful as they’ve been since COVID. It was a great look at [the] strawberry patch,” Black said.
They’ve been cleaning up over the last few days. picking up the crushed fruit, and old leaves. But its set their harvest picking back three weeks.
“It’s a small window season. You kind of get April, you got May and you may get into June a little bit. So, you know, you’re only talking about eight weeks and you take three weeks out of that,” he continued. “And that was the three weeks we talked about where we’re beginning and starting our major part of it. So that’s pretty impactful for us.”
The family hasn’t estimated how much money they are losing from the storm, their main concern was not being available for families to pick their own strawberries or host school field trips for a while.
Although it’s only been a week.. new strawberries are already blooming and for the Black family — that’s a plus.
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“You see the more blooms up here. Some of them some of them get damaged by the hail, but a lot of them are still going to be able to produce more berries. And we can see that there and they’re going to come back. We’re very hopeful that over the next couple of weeks that we’ll be able to start harvesting a lot more,” he said.
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