Light Crop This Year on Some Fruit Varieties

Q. This year our apricot tree hardly produced enough fruit to bother making jam. Is it possible our warmish winter was a factor? We don’t know if this variety is a low chill variety since it came with the house. Has anyone else mentioned low production with apricots this year?

Apricot fruit closeup. This is what good tree ripened fruit should look like.

A. We have about 12 different varieties of apricots at the Ahern Orchard and I oversaw about 10 varieties at the University Orchard. These apricots ranged in chilling hours but received enough cold winter temperatures to satisfy their chilling requirements for over 20 years. The light fruit set was probably due to our cold, wet spring weather.

            If the tree was loaded with flowers but produce very little fruit, it was a pollination problem, not because of a lack in winter chilling.

Apricot skin disease due to spring rain and high humidity

            The weather was mostly cold during February when apricots and many peaches were flowering. Bee activity was light due to cold weather and overcast skies. Yes, bees are needed for pollination.

            I was watching the flowers in February and visits by honeybees were very light when flowers were open. The early apricot varieties, Katy and Flavor Delight (really an aprium), set a very light fruit crop and were harvested over the last three weeks. A light fruit set was true also of some plums and pluots. It depends when flowers were open for pollination.

            Cool weather during fruit development also affects the sugar content of fruit. Cool temperatures result in fruit with less sugar content and more acidity. This is also true of grapes and many other fruit.

            It was not a good year for some apricots and peach varieties if they were flowering during cool weather and skies were overcast. Our spring weather was strange and not normal for us.

            I am confident next year we will be back to normal and apricots should have a heavy fruit load.