SPRING has sprung and while that means sunshine and warmer temperatures during the day, it also means growers are facing the peak frost window.
At Grass Patch, 'Jack' returned with a vengeance in the early hours of Tuesday morning, with temperature gauges on John Sanderson's farm reading as low as -1.6 degrees Celcius.
At about 2am it dropped below zero, but a little bit of wind picked up which brought the temperature back up.
Then at about 4.30am it started going down and getting colder again until 6.30am when it hit -1.60C before it started to warm up again, meaning it was in negative territory for two hours.
Mr Sanderson said the scary part about it being that cold for that long was the risk of a stem frost.
"The only experience I've personally had with stem frost was in 2019 when it was -3.5 degrees for hours, so I'm hoping it wasn't cold enough for long enough this time to get a really bad stem frost," Mr Sanderson said.
While most of the wheat at both the Grass Patch and Varley farms wasn't sown until the end of May or beginning of June, there was some which went in earlier that he is worried about.
"I got to some of the wheat just before 7am, when it had already started to warm up a bit, and the heads were saturated," he said.
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"I didn't catch them frozen, but I think they would have had to have been which will have an effect."
In Mr Sanderson's experience if frost nails canola during flowering, the plant will just sprout more as it is quite a resilient crop.
In early July he copped four frosts in a row which knocked the flowers off the canola, but it just kept going after.
"Now the canola has finished about 80 per cent of its flowering, they're starting to drop off and we've got some really beautiful, fat pods," Mr Sanderson said.
"With that being the case, frost can do a fair bit of damage and it can kill whole pods or take out seeds within them.
"Canola is a resilient crop so it will try again if the pods have been hurt, but the season is going to start changing soon."
Ultimately, Mr Sanderson won't know for seven to 10 days just how much his crops have been impacted by the freezing temperatures.
