People have been picking strawberries at Heckman Orchards in Effort ever since Amber Borger’s grandparents established the farm in the 1962.

It won’t happen this year.

In fact, Borger isn’t even sure that there will be any strawberry crop at all.

“It’s devastating to us. It’s disappointing for our customers,” she said.

Borger explained that a late May frost sent temperatures to 26 degrees – and the mercury remained there for four hours.

The late May frost, Borger said, decimated the plants.

“That temperature drop is not good for anything in the ground. For us, it was detrimental. It destroyed our strawberry crop unfortunately,” she said of the 7 acres. “We sustained such significant damage that we’re not sure at this moment if we are going to have them at all.”

Borger said they’ll wait to see if they can harvest any of the crop – and are informing their customers that they might have to look elsewhere.

“We never remember anything like this happening – like ever. We had damage some years from various weather-related events but never that we didn’t have anything, or such a minimal crop,” she said. “To have that significant of a freeze that late in May is unheard of.”

Although the strawberry situation is up in the air, the farm will sell its flowers, vegetable plants and other items – including its recently ripened greenhouse tomatoes - daily from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Borger is hoping for a successful season even though drought conditions are persisting.

“Any support that you can give to your local farmers this year is more critical than ever before. We need people to come,” she said. “It’s not just us suffering. It’s all the farmers and all the types of farming. We all need the rain.”

If Nevin Frey of Nev & Nise Produce Greenhouse in Lehighton wasn’t able to cover his farm’s strawberries, he knows the frost would have killed them.

“Back when we had the frost. I actually covered every strawberry, every plant, we had. We had 2,000 feet of covers out in the fields,” he said. “We saved our harvest though. Without that, we would have lost it. And that’s what happened to a lot of people.”

Frey said he planted 900 strawberry plants on plastic. He runs lines for irrigation, too.

“That’s totally different that the Pennsylvania traditional strawberry that is grown on bare ground,” he said.

He’s able to cover the raised beds if frost is a threat, like it was May 17 into May 18.

“We saved everything we had,” he said. “(Without the covers) We would have lost it, no doubt about it.”

Frey said the berries turned out excellent. He and his wife, Denise Frey, recently sold 52 quarts in 40 minutes from their 445 Stewart Creek Rd. farm.

Gould’s Produce and Farm Market in Brodheadsville just began picking and stocking strawberries.

“I can tell you this: we were one of the lucky ones” that wasn’t severely impacted by the May frost, said a woman at the 829 Frable Rd. stand.

The farm has an irrigation system that it moves from area to area as needed, she said, so that might have also helped the strawberry crop.

While there are strawberries in stock, Gould’s hasn’t yet opened its fields for pick-your-own.

They’ll know better over the weekend, she said. Folks can check the farm’s Facebook page for updates, she said.

“Thank you for understanding, this has been a very difficult spring for us all as Mother Nature is in charge,” according to a recent post.