Gadenin日本語Get the appFour jobs carry the season
An apricot is not a demanding tree in the way a fig or a citrus is demanding. It will survive years of neglect and still look healthy. But it will not crop under neglect, because four jobs each fall in a narrow window and each is worth more than everything else put together.
Those jobs are frost protection at flowering, hand pollination while the flowers are open, an even water supply from fruit set until picking, and thinning after the tree has dropped what it cannot carry. Feeding, mulching and tying in are all worth doing, but none of them rescues a season where one of the four was missed.
If your time is limited, work down that list in order. A tree that was covered on the cold nights and pollinated by hand will give you something even if you never feed it. A perfectly fed tree whose blossom froze gives you nothing.
Hand pollination, because nothing is flying yet
Apricots are self-fertile, so a single tree can set a full crop without a second tree anywhere near it. The problem is not compatibility, it is delivery. The flowers open so early that bees and hoverflies are often not yet active: most fly properly only above about 55F (13C), and on a bright cold day at blossom time you may see nothing on the tree at all.
This is why hand pollination pays for an apricot more than for any other garden fruit. It takes about five minutes a day for the week the tree is in flower, and on a small tree or a trained fan it reliably converts a full blossom into a full set. If the tree is under row cover or in a greenhouse, hand pollination is not optional, because you have shut out what few insects there were.
- Pick the right time of day Work in the middle of a dry day, ideally early afternoon when the flowers are fully open and the pollen is loose and dry. Damp pollen clumps and will not transfer, so skip a wet or foggy day and catch up the next.
- Use a soft brush or a cotton bud A soft artist's brush about a quarter inch (6 mm) wide is ideal. Some gardeners use a rabbit's tail or a ball of cotton wool on a stick. Anything soft enough not to tear the anthers will work.
- Go flower to flower, in one direction Dab the center of each open flower in turn, working systematically along each branch so you do not lose your place. You are picking up pollen from some flowers and depositing it in others as you go; there is no need to separate the two actions.
- Repeat daily while the tree is in flower Flowers open over about a week to ten days, so a single pass catches only part of the crop. Go over the whole tree once a day for as long as new flowers keep opening.
- Uncover for the insects when you can On any mild day with no frost forecast, take the row cover off in the morning so the insects that are flying can work the tree, and put it back in the late afternoon.
If the tree flowers and sets nothing at all in a year when there was no frost, the cause is nearly always poor pollen transfer rather than a sterile tree. Hand pollinate the following season before you conclude anything is wrong with the tree itself.
Watering: even supply matters more than volume
An established apricot in open ground is fairly drought-tolerant and rarely needs watering except in its first two summers and in a genuine drought. The exception is the period from fruit set until picking, when the tree needs a steady supply. It is the swings that cause damage, not the average: soil that goes from bone dry to a heavy soak while the stone is hardening produces split stones and cracked fruit.
Water deeply and infrequently. One long slow soak a week that wets the soil to 12 inches (30 cm) beats a daily sprinkle every time, because shallow watering keeps the roots at the surface where they dry out fastest. Water at the base rather than over the leaves and fruit, especially once the crop starts to color, since wet fruit skins are how brown rot gets started.
A tree in a large container is a completely different case. Its compost can dry out in a single hot day, and once the rootball has shrunk away from the sides of the pot water runs straight down the gap and out of the bottom. Check pots daily through summer, and if the compost has pulled away, stand the pot in a tray of water for an hour to rewet it properly.
A dry spell in the three weeks before picking costs fruit size that cannot be recovered later, however much you water afterwards. If you can only water once during the whole summer, make it then.
Feeding: nitrogen early, potash late, nothing in autumn
The feeding mistake that damages apricots is nitrogen late in the season. Nitrogen in early spring is right and builds the leaf area that ripens the fruit. Nitrogen after midsummer pushes soft sappy growth that will not harden before the cold, and soft unripened wood is exactly what canker and winter dieback take first.
| Stage | What to give | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Late winter, before bud movement | Balanced general fertilizer over the root area, then mulch | Feeds the flush of growth that follows flowering |
| Flowering to fruit set | Nothing new; keep the mulch topped up | The tree is living on reserves; extra feed now changes nothing |
| Fruit swelling | High-potash liquid feed every two weeks for containers only | Pots have no soil reserve; trees in the ground do not need it |
| After harvest | Potash if anything at all, never nitrogen | Ripens the wood for winter and sets next year's flower buds |
| Autumn and winter | Compost or well-rotted manure as a surface mulch | Feeds the soil slowly without pushing growth |
Thinning, staking and the running repairs
An apricot in a good year sets far more fruit than it can finish. Let the tree do its own shedding first: there is a natural drop a few weeks after set when the tree abandons what it cannot support. Only when that has finished do you thin, taking the crop down to one fruit every 3 to 4 inches (8 to 10 cm) along the branch, removing damaged, twinned and clustered fruitlets first.
Thinning feels brutal and almost everyone leaves too much fruit for their first few years. The tree that carries everything gives you small dry fruit, breaks branches, and often takes the next year off entirely. Apricots are prone to biennial bearing, and overcropping is what triggers it.
While you are working through the tree, do the running repairs: check ties have not cut into the bark as the trunk thickened, prop or tie any branch that is bending under weight, rub out unwanted new shoots while they are still soft enough to remove with a thumb, and pull off any fruit that has split or started to rot before it infects the ones touching it.
What to record while you are out there
Three notes a season turn generic advice into your tree's own timetable. Write down the date the first flowers opened, the date the natural fruit drop finished, and the date you picked the first ripe fruit. Add a line on how the crop turned out and, if it was poor, what you think went wrong.
Flowering date tells you how much frost risk you are carrying in your garden and how early the row cover needs to be to hand. The end of the natural drop is your signal to start thinning. First pick, averaged over three years, tells you when to begin checking rather than being caught out by a tree that ripens in ten days.
Record the position of each tree too, and whether it is against a wall and which way that wall faces. After three seasons you will be able to tell whether a bad year was frost, thinning or water, instead of blaming the weather every time.