did the cold weather kill trees?

[Phil Lilley]

Speaking of Texoma... where's our fishing report??? And pictures!!!

[TexomaOkie]

Lots of rain and lots of high, muddy water! Didn't seem to bother the catfish too much, but did affect the striper and white bass fishing. When the water is muddy, shad are hard to find. When shad are hard to find, stripers are hard to find. Spent almost $200 on boat gas traveling long distances to clearer water to fish for stripers. Caught some quality fish of all three species, but not the typical numbers. Caught catfish on juglines baited with live shad and stripers and whitebass on Big Chugbugs and Rat-L-Traps. Biggest blue cat was 30lbs. and the biggest striper was 5 to 6lbs. We usually catch a few 12 to 14lb. stripers, but not this year. If the lake clears this spring, the striper fishing with artificials should be awesome. But, who knows if that will happen?

Still an awesome trip! Spent nine blessed days on the lake with my 80 year old dad and my brother. My brother and I have our own families, so it's the only time just the three of us still get to spend time together. It's become an annual event for us and I hope God blesses us with many more!

[gonefishin]

I dont know about the rest of the trees but it sure killed an apple and plum tree for me.

[Wayne SW/MO]

GF I wouldn't give up on them, some of my trees are just now showing signs of life. On the other side, the wet winter has my Iris looking better than ever.

[drbewley]

An article in the Little Rock newspaper said red oaks take 2 years to make an acorn crop and they would surely have acorns this year, but maybe not next year. Has anyone else heard of that?

[SKMO]

An article in the Little Rock newspaper said red oaks take 2 years to make an acorn crop and they would surely have acorns this year, but maybe not next year. Has anyone else heard of that?

The red oak species (black oak, red oak, blackjack, pin oak, shumard oak etc) take 2 years to develop acorns, so this years crop was pollinated last year in '06 and should make acorns. However next year ('08) will probably be limited to non-existant on the red oaks.

The white oak group (white oak, post oak, chinkapin oak etc) pollinate and fruit all the same year so we will probably not have much of a white oak acorn crop this year.

This variation may be nature's way of assuring some type of mast production in case of a freeze such as we had.

[Seth]

It wouldn't bother me any if the acorn crop sucked this year. Then maybe the deer will hit our food plots harder after the acorns normally fall.

[Wayne SW/MO]

Well if that fails you can always do what the oldtimers did, hunt 'em.