The 4th of July weekend is typically the time of year Blenheim apricots are at their peak of ripeness in our area. This year, my 8 year old Blenheim apricot tree had 200-300 apricots, which is an enormous amount of fruit compared to prior years. Last Monday, my mom and I spent the holiday picking the apricots and making apricot jam. Every year, I like to try making something new with apricots. This year, I decided to make apricot/orange conserve in addition to apricot jam. We made it by adding 2 cups of orange juice to an apricot jam recipe using oranges from my valencia orange bush. The apricot/orange conserve turned out to be especially good.

These pictures show my apricot tree a few days before we harvested the fruit. Fresh apricots are one of the things I look forward to with anticipation every summer. Like other types of stone fruits, they are in season for such a short time, but the flavor of home grown tree-ripened apricots makes them worth waiting for.

The bird netting I wrapped around the tree in mid-June kept the birds as well as the squirrels from harvesting the fruit before we did. Putting the netting on and taking the netting off is the most difficult part of growing and harvesting apricots in our yard. To make the process of netting the tree more manageable, I prune the tree heavily in the winter and once more in June just before putting the netting on to keep the tree about 10 feet tall. But besides the trouble of netting the tree, growing apricots is easy, at least in our climate. I fertilize the tree about once a year with all-purpose fertilizer and water it with an automatic drip system everyday in the summertime.

Our 8 year old Blenheim apricot tree just finished its bloom. I took this picture of it last weekend. It started blooming about 2 weeks ago. It was a beautiful but brief bloom. The rain we had here on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week knocked off most of the remaining petals. Our peach, nectarine, and Japanese plum trees are also in bloom now, and there appears to be no shortage of bees pollinating the blossoms.

These trees have always bloomed very early here. Although it varies from year to year, they typically bloom in late February and early March. I think that their tendency to bloom early is part of the reason many peach, nectarine, apricot, and Japanese plums are not recommended for cold climates that are prone to hard freezes late in the season in March and April. An early warm spell could trick them to into bloom and then a subsequent freeze might damage many of the flowers or newly forming fruit.

Yesterday, my mom came over to our house to help me harvest my first batch of Blenheim apricots of the year from the above pictured tree in our yard. We both love the taste of tree ripened Blenheim apricots. They seem to be the most flavorful apricot. My parents have a 30+ year old Blenheim apricot tree in their yard that is still producing quality fruit.

My tree is now 7 years old. Its fruit are large and have a very good flavor. They are much better tasting than the grocery store apricots I have eaten. Although, we both think that the fruit from my parents’ 30+ year old tree is much sweeter than the fruit from my young tree. Their apricots taste like a dessert. My guess is that a mature apricot tree has a greater ability than a young tree to generate sugars and produce sweeter fruits.

I have had to build a virtual fortress of bird netting around my apricot tree to keep the birds and squirrels from eating the fruit. So far, I have lost only a few fruits to the wildlife. I wrapped bird netting around all sides of the tree up to the upper weak branches and then tied it tightly around the bottom with string leaving no openings around the sides or the bottom for the squirrels to crawl through. I loosely draped the netting through the high branches to keep the birds from flying inside. This netting technique has mostly kept the bird and squirrels out.

A few days ago, I peeled away the netting to pick a few apricots and then didn’t reseal the netting tightly enough after I was finished. By the time I was back inside our kitchen, a squirrel had already found its way inside the netting. After shooing it away, I wrapped two extra nets around the tree for a total of 3 nets. There hasn’t been any more breaches since then. The two week period when apricots are ripening in late June and early July is the most important time to net. That’s when the birds and squirrels seem to to go after them the most.

August is the high season for fruit in our backyard.  In addition to peaches and Bartlett pears, I also harvested a bunch of autumn royal apricots this week.  When I planted this apricot tree six years ago, I was hoping that it would live up to its name and that the apricots would ripen in the fall.  This year is only the second year this tree has produced fruit, and both years the fruit has ripened in August.  In retrospect, it probably would have been better to select fruit trees with different ripening schedules so that I am not overwhelmed with too much fruit from multiple trees.  On the other hand, I would rather have too much fruit than too little!

Unfortunately, most of the apricots on this tree split a few weeks ago and then began to rot at the line of splitting, before they were even ripe.  The cluster in this picture is one of the few on the tree that reached ripeness without splitting.   

There were about 150-200 apricots on the tree 2 weeks ago, but I was only able to harvest about 3 dozen apricots that were edible.  They weren’t as flavorful as Blenheim apricots.  Instead of eating them fresh, my mom and I turned them into a dozen jars of apricot jam.  

Recently, I have noticed that many recipes for apricot desserts call for apricot jam, instead of fresh apricots.  Apparently, apricot jam can be useful for much more than spreading on toast.

Blenheim apricot tree with netting

I have fond memories of picking apricots from our Blenheim apricot tree in the summertime when I was growing up.  We would eat them fresh, and my mom would cook apricot cobbler and apricot jam.

The fruit on the Blenheim apricot tree in my backyard is ripening this week, and they taste delicious.  The fruit is very sweet with only a hint of tartness.  Tree-ripened Blenheim apricots are the best tasting apricots.  By tree-ripened, I mean apricots that are left on the tree until they are not only orange in color, but soft to touch.  When the surface of the fruit is mostly hard when squeezed, it is not ready yet.  Ideally, an apricot should be left on the tree until it is soft enough to make a small dent in the flesh.  Usually, an apricot becomes soft enough to eat about week after beginning to turn orange.

Blenheim apricots often are not completely orange even when ripe.  The side of the apricot that is exposed to the sun tends to turn orange, while the side of the apricot that is shaded from the sun may be a bit green or yellow, although the inside is soft and sweet.  A Blenheim apricot will often have a characteristic greenish or yellowish cast on one side that distinguishes it from many of the commercially sold apricots that one finds in a grocery store. 

I have heard that one of the reasons that fresh Blenheim apricots are rarely sold in grocery stores these days is because customers rarely select them due to their non-uniform color.  Also, Blenheim apricots tend to rot a few days after they ripen.  So, they do not have a long shelf life, and they are unsuitable for transport over long distances.  That’s too bad, because Blenheim apricots are really the best tasting apricots in my opinion.  It seems that the only way you can get them anymore is by growing a tree in your backyard. 

Squirrels are the main problem I have had with growing apricots.  Squirrels love apricots.  They take them off the tree just as they are beginning to turn orange, before I consider them to be ripe.  Squirrels in my area will strip all of the fruit off a tree in a matter of days.  The only solution that works is to wrap the tree with bird netting.  Every winter I trim the tree down to a height of about 10 feet tall.  Fruit trees do not develop fruit on newly grown branches.  Therefore, topping the tree to 10 feet ensures that the tree only develops fruit on the lower branches. 

I only need to net the lower part of the tree, which requires a lot less effort than netting the full canopy.  I use clothes pins to secure the net to the branches, and make sure that the net is wrapped around the inside branches as much as possible so that the squirrels can’t access the fruit by jumping past the net into the inner branches.  Also I wrap part of the net around the trunk, and tie it with string so they can’t crawl up the trunk through a gap in the net.  I have hardly lost any apricots to squirrels this way! 

Blenheim apricots grow great in California.  But because they bloom early (e.g., the first week of March in our area in 2008), they are hard to grow in regions that are prone to late frosts.  A late frost could damage the blossoms or newly developing fruit.