Gadenin日本語Get the appThis crop is picked to be processed, never eaten fresh
Say this before anything else about harvesting: you do not eat this fruit raw. Even fully colored it stays hard, intensely sour and astringent, and the flesh and stone of an unripe fruit carry cyanogenic compounds that make raw eating both unpleasant and unwise. Every use it has runs through processing of one kind or another, whether that is salting, pickling, steeping, cooking down or infusing.
That changes what ripeness means here. With a dessert apricot you are waiting for the sugars and the softening that let you eat it off the tree. With this fruit you are picking to a specification set by what you intend to make, and the two specifications are very different: hard and green, or yellowed and yielding. Neither is more ripe than the other in a useful sense; they are two harvests from the same tree at two moments.
Fruit is generally ready somewhere between eighty and a hundred days after the flowers opened, which given the winter flowering usually puts picking in early summer. Because the flowering date swings by weeks from year to year with the weather, count forward from your own recorded flowering date rather than trusting a calendar.
Two harvests, two ways to judge them
Decide before you pick which you are after, because you cannot go back. Once the fruit has begun to soften and color it will not serve the uses that need firm green fruit, and green fruit picked early will not continue to develop the aroma that comes from hanging on the tree.
| Harvest | How the fruit looks and feels | What it suits | When to pick |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hard green | Uniformly green, rock hard, no give at all under the thumb, fine down still on the skin | Salting and pickling, firm preserves, steeping in spirit or sugar | Once the fruit has reached full size but before any color break |
| Color break | Green with a yellow flush on the sunny cheek, still firm but no longer rock hard | A middle option; firmer than a soft pick, more aroma than a green one | A few days to a week after full size, watched daily |
| Yellow and yielding | Yellow to amber, aromatic, gives slightly under gentle pressure | Cooked and infused preparations that want softer, more perfumed flesh | Left on the tree a further one to two weeks, picked before it drops |
Do not mix the two in one container. Soft yellowed fruit bruises against hard green fruit and starts rotting within a day, and the mixture is useless for anything that needs an even texture.
How to take the fruit off the tree
The fruit sits on short spurs that will carry next year's crop, so how you pick matters beyond this season. Tearing fruit off takes the spur with it, and a tree stripped roughly gives noticeably less the following year.
- Pick in the cool of the morning Fruit picked in the heat of the afternoon is at field heat and deteriorates fast, particularly the softer pick. Pick early, and get the fruit into shade immediately rather than leaving filled baskets in the sun.
- Lift and twist, do not pull Cup the fruit, lift it slightly and twist. A green fruit that is ready parts from the spur with a small resistance. If it will not come without dragging the spur, it is not ready, and forcing it costs you next year's flowers at that point.
- Take the green harvest in one or two passes Green fruit sizes up fairly evenly across the tree, so a hard green harvest is usually a single job over a day or two. This is the point of picking green: it is one operation rather than a fortnight of daily rounds.
- Work the yellow harvest daily Fruit left to color does not do it all at once. Go over the tree every day or two, taking what has yellowed and giving slightly, and leaving the rest. Fruit that reaches full color and is not picked drops within a day or two.
- Handle the softer pick like eggs Use shallow trays no more than two or three fruit deep for yellowed fruit. Bruises do not show for a day and then go brown and soft, and one bruised fruit spoils the batch it sits in.
- Clear the windfalls Pick up every dropped fruit under the tree, however unusable it looks, and do not leave them to rot on the ground. Fallen fruit feeds the rot and the fruit-boring pests that will be waiting for you next season.
What it costs to pick too late
Leaving fruit on beyond full color is the commonest mistake, usually because the tree looks so good with amber fruit hanging on it. The fruit drops, splits on the ground, and the fallen fruit draws wasps and boring insects to the tree at exactly the time you least want them. A tree carrying more fruit than it should also sets fewer flower buds for the following winter, which is one of the causes of alternate heavy and light years.
Once picked, neither harvest keeps in the ordinary sense. Hard green fruit holds a few days in a cool place; yellowed fruit holds barely two. This is not a crop you pick and store while you decide what to do with it. Have your processing set up and your containers ready before you start picking, and plan to deal with the whole harvest within a couple of days of taking it off the tree.
If you cannot process it immediately, freezing whole fruit is the practical holding measure, and frozen fruit works perfectly well for most preparations afterwards. Refrigeration alone does not save it: the flesh goes brown and mealy within days.
What to record at picking time
The harvest notes that repay themselves are short. Record the date of first picking and the date you finished, the total weight taken off each tree, which pick you took and what you made with it, and the number of days between the tree being in full flower and the first picking.
That last number is the useful one. Once you have it for two or three seasons you can look at the flowering date in any given winter and know within a few days when to have your containers and salt ready, instead of checking the tree every other day for a fortnight. Note the proportion of fruit that was blemished or bored as well, because a rising figure over two years is the earliest sign that a pest is building up in the tree.