Wednesday, November 13, 2013

First Apricots

Today we ate our very first home grown Apricots. Tree ripened and fruit fly free. Delicious!



I know we always blog about how great exclusion netting is for fruit trees, but when you taste unadulterated, pure, sweet, juicy flesh of a home grown beauty like this, wah, I just want to tell everyone again! Its true that fruit flies are a huge problem in Perth, but netting seems to be the cure! And I think it looks beautiful - kind of bridal. 




It wont be a huge crop. Unfortunately we choose a double grafted tree and only one side seems to have a good crop - oh well. The other thing to understand is that with a double grafted tree the flowers come at different times, so in this case we had fruit forming and becoming susceptible to fruit fly on one half, while the other half was still in flower and needing pollination. So for a while we had to have only half the tree netted allowing pollinators on to the flowers and keeping fruit fly off the fruit. A bit of a fiddle and I would not ever plant a double grafted tree again, its one of those things you don't think about until you are faced with the situation! 

The other thing to report is that we should have a bumper crop of boysenberries this year - here they are dropping petals and green just at the moment...but just wait...



5 comments:

  1. wow, well done! apricots are $18/kg here at the moment, so I won't be buying any for ages, and they won't be as nice as your homegrown ones.... good advice about the double grafting too, thanks.

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    1. A pleasure. Its great to finally grow something that is super expensive in the shops - usually we are growing caulies when they are about $2 each!!

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  2. Great to know Freo folk are able to grow apricots. Yay.

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  3. What is the variety of your apricot? I believe many won't fruit in Perth as its not cold enough. Also do you need two trees to pollinate?

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  4. The varieties are Trevatt and Newcastle and they seem to set fruit ok, but could be better (ask for low chill varieties if you're in Perth). Apricots are self fertile so you don't need two trees.

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