Houston Chronicle by Cayla Harris 2/26/2021
Mani Skaria has been through this before.
When the temperatures dropped below freezing this month, it was impossible not to think back to the 1989 freeze that wiped out more than 20,000 acres of citrus. He had seen it firsthand, just a year after he moved to the Rio Grande Valley to work as a faculty member at the Texas A&M Citrus Center.
A Washington Post article published that year was headlined “TEXAS CITRUS GROWERS FEAR CROP IS DESTROYED.†Three decades later, staring at his own citrus operation in Hargill, a rural town about an hour’s drive from the border with Mexico, Skaria feels the same heartache.
“When I drive around my own orchard and other places, it looks very sad,†Skaria, the owner of US Citrus, a company known for its fresh produce boxes sent directly to subscribers. The leaves are all brown, and vertical cracks break open the trunks — signs that don’t bode well for the trees’ survival, he said.
More:
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/local/article/All-shades-of-dead-brown-Freeze-pummeled-15983000.phpI think I've lost all my citrus trees. One Satsuma tree I planted over 30 yrs ago.
