The unseasonably warm weather at the start of April may have been welcomed by the general public, but don't include the county’s strawberry growers in that group.

Odds are the growers weren’t happy with the warm-up, and even less thrilled with the mid-April snowstorm that followed and a dry spell in May and June. The result has been a disappointing strawberry harvest.

“We usually harvest fresh for 28 days. This year we got 11 days in,” Lake Leelanau grower Bruce Price said, adding that he and his family have wrapped up their fresh fruit harvest for the season.

Price said the hot weather and the lack of rain made the fresh fruit smaller then last year’s crop, and will limit how many harvests he will do. Usually, growers have a first bloom, known as the king bloom, early on and then can get up to four secondary blooms. Price said this year’s king bloom produced some good quality fruit, but the size is down and he is not sure what he going to get for the secondary blooms.

“We cut off the fresh harvest this weekend. We’re going to wait a little bit to let the secondary fruit grow a little then harvest for processing,” he said.

Steve Bardenhagen, who operates the family’s fruit growing operations on Horn Road, said he’s seeing the same problem.

“Our size is definitely down, the quality is good, but it’s been so warm that we’re not going to have as much fruit as we usually have,” he said.

Both Price and Bardenhagen said the main culprit is the weather. “Strawberries are a 72-degree fruit, a June fruit. When you get 90 degrees like we did a couple of days last week, that is bad,” Price said.

The two Lake Leelanau growers have heard the same from other growers around the county and in northwestern lower Michigan. “I’ve been talking with guys in Grand Traverse and Manistee and they are seeing the same thing. A good quality king berry, then quite a disparity with the secondary and third berries,” Price said.

James Nugent, the semi-retired fruit specialist with Northwestern Michigan Horticultural Research Station in Bingham Township, said strawberries thrive in cooler weather. “Heat is tough on strawberries. Berries grow really in cooler weather. If they get exposed to hotter temperatures, they tend to ripen early and stop growing,” he said.