Gadenin日本語Get the appFour jobs decide the whole year
An apricot needs less routine attention than most garden fruit. It will go years without feeding, tolerate poor pruning better than it deserves to, and rarely need watering once established. What it will not tolerate is missing any of four jobs, each of which falls in a window of days rather than weeks.
The first is frost protection while the blossom is open, because open flowers die at about 28F (minus 2C) and an apricot flowers before nearly anything else in the garden. The second is hand pollination during the same period, because the tree is self-fertile but often flowers when no insects are flying. The third is thinning to one fruit every 3 to 4 inches (8 to 10 cm), done after the tree has finished its own natural drop. The fourth is picking, which means going over the tree every second day for a window of about ten days.
Everything else on this calendar supports those four. If a season goes badly, work back through them before blaming anything else.
The year, season by season
The table below is written in seasons rather than months so it reads the same in either hemisphere. Anchor it to your own tree by the buds: the moment the flower buds swell and show color is the start of the working year, and everything before that is preparation.
| Season | Main jobs | The decision to make |
|---|---|---|
| Early winter, dormant | Pull off every shriveled mummified fruit still hanging. Clear fallen fruit and leaves from underneath. Check stakes and ties. Cut no wood at all. | Whether any tie has begun to cut into the bark as the trunk thickened |
| Late winter | Have row cover and clips ready by the tree before the buds move. Mulch 2 to 3 inches (5 to 8 cm) over the roots, a hand's width off the trunk. Apply a balanced feed. | Whether you can physically reach and cover the whole tree; if not, plan to reduce its height next summer |
| Buds swelling to first flower | Watch every night's forecast. Throw row cover over the tree in the late afternoon whenever frost is likely and remove it in the morning. | Whether tonight goes below 30F (minus 1C) at the tree, not at the weather station |
| Full flower | Hand pollinate daily with a soft brush in the middle of a dry day. Keep row cover to hand. Uncover on mild days so insects can work. | Whether any insects are actually flying; if not, hand pollination is the entire crop |
| Petal fall to fruit set | Stop covering once the risk has passed. Check for aphids on soft tips and squash colonies by hand. Begin regular deep watering. | Whether browning flowers are frost damage or disease; frost hits all over at once and stops |
| Late spring, leaves fully out | First pruning pass: dead, damaged, crossing and inward wood. Rub out water shoots while soft. Wait for the natural fruit drop to finish. | Do not start thinning until the tree has finished shedding its own fruit |
| Early summer, stone hardening | Thin to one fruit every 3 to 4 inches (8 to 10 cm). Water evenly without swinging wet to dry. Prop or tie bending branches. | How hard to thin; almost everyone leaves too much in their first years |
| Midsummer to harvest | Check the tree every second day. Pick by ground color, scent and the lift-and-twist test. Remove split or rotting fruit as you go. | Whether all green has gone from the ground color; red flush alone is not ripeness |
| Immediately after harvest | Second pruning pass: shorten this summer's side shoots to about six leaves, and renew one or two of the oldest congested branches. | Which young shoot to keep as a replacement on each renewed branch |
| Autumn, leaf fall | Rake up and remove all fallen fruit and leaves. Spread compost as a surface mulch. Cut no wood. | Resist all tidying with pruners; the spore season has started |
Water and feed through the year
An established apricot in open ground needs watering only in its first two summers and in a drought, with one exception that matters more than the rule. From fruit set until picking the tree needs an even supply, and it is the swings that do the damage. Soil that goes from bone dry to a heavy soak while the stone is hardening produces split stones and cracked fruit, and a dry spell in the three weeks before picking costs size that no later watering recovers.
Water deeply and rarely: one slow soak a week in dry weather that wets the soil to 12 inches (30 cm), delivered at the base rather than over the fruit. Shallow daily watering keeps the roots at the surface where they suffer first in a hot spell.
On feeding, the whole discipline is nitrogen early and never late. A balanced feed as growth begins in late winter is right. Nitrogen after midsummer pushes soft growth that will not harden before winter, and unripened wood is exactly what canker and dieback take. From late summer, feed potash if you feed at all, and use compost as a surface mulch through the autumn.
A tree in a large container follows a different calendar. Check the compost daily through summer, feed a high-potash liquid every two weeks from fruit set to harvest, and if the rootball shrinks away from the sides of the pot, stand the pot in water for an hour to rewet it properly.
Frost at flowering: the one thing you cannot schedule
Apricots flower earlier than peaches, plums and almost everything else in a temperate garden, which is the whole reason they fail. Open blossom dies at about 28F (minus 2C), and the flowers stay hanging afterwards looking brown and diseased. A tree that flowers magnificently and sets nothing has almost always met one cold night at the wrong moment.
You cannot put this on a calendar; you can only be ready for it. Keep two layers of row cover and some clips beside the tree from the moment the buds show color. Put the cover on in the late afternoon and take it off in the morning, both so the tree does not overheat and so any insects that are flying can reach the flowers.
Wet soil holds and releases more overnight heat than dry soil, so if the ground is dry and a frost is forecast, water the root area in the afternoon. It is a small effect, but marginal nights are exactly where small effects change the outcome. And where you can choose, plant against a wall in the first place, which is worth more than everything you can do on the night.
The five dates worth writing down every year
Five dates turn this generic calendar into your own tree's timetable: the day the first flower opened, the day the last frost of the spring occurred, the day the natural fruit drop finished, the day you picked the first ripe fruit, and the day you saw the first sign of disease.
Flowering date tells you how much risk you are carrying and how early the row cover needs to be ready. The last frost date, set beside it, tells you over a few years whether your garden can realistically ripen apricots without a wall. The end of the natural drop is the signal to start thinning. First pick, averaged across seasons, tells you when to start checking. And the first sign of disease, counted backwards, tells you when the preventive work actually needed doing.
Add the position of each tree and one line on how the crop turned out, and after three seasons a poor year stops being a mystery. You will be able to say whether it was frost, thinning or water, which is the difference between improving the tree and repeating the same year indefinitely.