A cruel winter appeared a bit meaner this week to one Alto farmer.

Warmer than average temperatures have caused Drew Echols' strawberries to bloom and his peach buds to swell - early.

The timing is all wrong, said Echols, farm manager of Jaemor Farms.

"It's almost comical right now. At this point there is nothing you can do but laugh about it and say, ‘I can't believe it's this warm,' " he said. "It's just unusual, really abnormal. Obviously, it's too warm, too quick."

With the National Weather Service reporting temperatures 5 to 10 degrees higher than average, Echols and farmers like him are worried how their early crops will handle freezing temperatures certain to return.

Weather experts agree. The cold will come.

"If we have another week of temperatures in the mid-60s and above, we're really going to start to see peaches and blueberries start to bloom," said David Stooksbury, state climatologist and professor of engineering at the University of Georgia. "We're almost guaranteed a killing freeze between now and when we'd normally expect the danger of frost to be done."

Stooksbury usually relaxes about frost when the Masters golf tournament in Augusta takes place the first full week in April.

Home gardeners tempted to plant their summer vegetables before then would be wise to stick with another Southern tradition, he warned.

"If we're talking about putting in the spring garden, the lettuce, potatoes, peas, those are things that can go in," Stooksbury said. "Plant the summer garden on Good Friday. This year that should be a good bet because it will be in late April. Good Friday we should be very safe."

As far as flowers go, he advised sticking with pansies, working on a fescue grass lawn or simply admiring the ornamental trees on the cusp of, or already blooming.

"The problem with freezes is it only takes one that will set everything back," Stooksbury said. "It only takes one night regardless of how beautiful it was up until that night."

He explained why using the biochemistry of a peach. The fruit internally factors the number of freezing days as well as warm days. Right now, the combination is such that Georgia peach buds are acting like winter is over.

Farmers like Echols, who manages 8 acres of strawberries and a nearly 60-acre peach orchard, know better.

"We're still at least two weeks away from full bloom, which in the grand scheme, that would be only about two weeks early. But with this little season here, early spring, late winter, two weeks for us is a big deal," he said. "The weather fluctuates so much, you never know when the jet stream is going to change, and the trough drops down in Northeast Georgia and there we are."

He subscribes to agricultural weather reports and keeps track of his own thermometers situated around Jaemor Farms.

What he wants more than anything is to see those mercury levels fall.

As long as his peaches have not blossomed, they will be safe in the cold.

"If it hit below freezing tonight, I'd hit my knees and thank God it got that cold," Echols said.