Gadenin日本語Get the appAn apricot picked early never becomes ripe
This is the fact that decides everything else about picking apricots. Once the fruit leaves the tree it will keep softening and it will keep coloring, but it stops gaining sugar, because the sugar arrives from the leaves and stops the moment the stalk is broken. A shop apricot picked hard for transport goes soft and orange in a bowl and still tastes of almost nothing, and a home-grown one picked a week early does exactly the same.
The reward for waiting is out of proportion to the wait. An apricot left the extra four or five days it needs is a different fruit: perfumed, dripping, and sweet enough that people who thought they disliked apricots change their minds. That is the whole reason for growing the tree, and it is thrown away by picking a few days early.
The cost of waiting is that fully ripe apricots bruise if you look at them and keep only two or three days. Plan for that. Decide what you are going to do with a glut before the glut arrives, not while you are standing under the tree with a full bowl.
Reading ripeness on the tree
Color alone is not a reliable signal, because an apricot colors up long before it is ripe and often carries a red flush on the sunny side that says only that the sun reached it. What you are reading is the ground color, the background shade underneath any flush, plus scent and feel. Use several signs together rather than any one of them.
| Sign | Not ready | Ready to pick |
|---|---|---|
| Ground color | Any green tint remaining in the background | Uniform gold to deep orange with no green anywhere |
| Feel at the shoulder | Hard all over, no give under a thumb | Slight softness beside the stalk, the flesh yields but does not dent |
| Scent | Nothing, or a faint green smell | Clearly perfumed when you put your nose to the fruit on the tree |
| Release | Has to be pulled, the stalk resists | Comes away with a gentle lift and a slight twist |
| Fallen fruit underneath | None, or only small green drops | The first fully colored fruit dropping of its own accord |
How to pick without bruising the crop
A ripe apricot is fragile in a way that a plum is not. The skin marks under a fingernail and the flesh bruises where a finger presses hard, and the bruise turns brown within a day. Almost all of the fruit spoiled in a home crop is spoiled between the branch and the kitchen.
- Cup, do not grip Take the fruit in the palm of your hand rather than between fingertips. Fingertips concentrate the pressure into three small spots and those are the marks that go brown.
- Lift and twist gently Raise the fruit slightly and turn it a few degrees. If it is ready it separates at the stalk with almost no force. If you find yourself pulling, put it back and come again in two days.
- Pick into a shallow tray Use a single layer in a tray or a lined basket, never a deep bucket. Ripe apricots at the bottom of a deep container are crushed by the ones above before you get indoors.
- Keep the stalk, or at least the skin Fruit that comes away with its stalk keeps a day or two longer. If the stalk stays on the tree, use that fruit first, because the open scar is where rot starts.
- Sort as you go Any fruit that is split, marked or already softening on one side goes into a separate tray for eating or cooking today. One rotting apricot in a tray will take its neighbors with it overnight.
Go over the tree every second day rather than stripping it in one session. Apricots on the same branch can be four or five days apart, and the ones on the sunny outside will be ready well before those inside the canopy.
The whole tree goes over in about ten days
From the first properly ripe fruit to the last, an apricot tree usually gives you between one and two weeks, and in a hot summer it can be less. That is a short window, and it is why apricots have a reputation for going from not ready to overripe while you were away for the weekend.
Plan the picking window like an event. Clear space in the fridge, have jars and sugar in the house, and if you are going to be away during the likely week, ask somebody to pick for you. Fruit left on the tree past ripeness splits after rain, attracts wasps, and starts brown rot that then spreads through the fruit still hanging.
Clear every fruit from the tree and the ground when you finish, including the ones you do not want. Fruit left to shrivel on the branch over winter carries brown rot straight through to next year's crop, and picking up windfalls at the end of the season is one of the cheapest disease controls there is.
Keeping the crop, and what to write down
Fully ripe apricots hold two or three days at room temperature and about five in the fridge, and cold dulls the perfume, so take them out an hour before eating. Fruit that is nearly ripe finishes better in a paper bag at room temperature than in the fridge, though it still will not gain sugar. For anything beyond a few days, halve and stone the fruit and freeze it on a tray before bagging, or turn it into jam, which apricots do exceptionally well because the stones carry plenty of natural pectin.
Write down the date of the first pick and the date of the last, every year. Two or three seasons of those dates tell you your own tree's window far better than any general advice, and let you plan around it rather than being caught out.
Note the total weight too, and the average size of the fruit. Small fruit in a heavy year is the clearest evidence you did not thin hard enough, and it is the note that finally persuades most gardeners to take off more fruitlets next time.