First Stone Fruits, 2010

We had a difficult spring for stone fruits this year - lots of rain during blossom time. For the first time, fruit set was sparse on Flavor Delight Aprium. Also on Royalty and Golden Amber apricots, plus my favorite, Harcot. Not much going on with Canadian White Blenheim, either, but this is no surprise, as it needs a late pollinator and is in a marginal zone for winter chill here.

On the other hand, we got a good fruit set on Blenheim apricot, a disease-prone variety. And it is starting to ripen before temperatures reach 100 degrees - unusual around here. No pit burn. It's a great fruit if you're in a climate which is friendly to it.   For example, if you live in Santa Rosa, in what was once called "The Valley of Heart's Delight" based partly on the fruits grown there.  Various apricot varieties can be quite picky about the climates they prefer.  Apricot success here  this year is all about the weather.

Back to the start of the harvest season: Our first fruits were little Royal Rosa apricots. They were better this year than in the past. I think that their water was restricted a little as they ripened. They also need to be dead-ripe before you pick them, or they are bland.

Next came Flavor Delight Apriums - nice fruits - and Royalty (Not Royal), a big, mushy fruit on wind-resistant spurs which David likes because it reminds him of his Grandpa's apricots.

Harcots started soon after Flavor Delight. Not many of them, but they were big and luscious.

Some of them are pictured above with Flavor Delight apriums, a little yellow plumcot (blushing to red) from LE Cooke wholesalers and Arctic Star nectarine. The plumcot is an interesting fruit: soft and tender.  It loses quality when it goes beyond yellow with a little blush. It has a little bit of a delicate floral flavor. At its best, it's sweet, but can also tend toward being insipid. I think of them as resembling a wild fruit. Wild fruits seem to come in two main types - highly flavored and tart or even astringent, or slightly sweet and tending toward the insipid. This fruit is closer to the latter category. Some people really like them a lot. I think they would be good combined with cranberries for a less-assertive sauce.

They tend to ripen over a very short period of time, especially in years hotter than this one. The tree is compact and attractive, with nice leaves and showier blossoms than most plums grown for fruit. It's easy to care for. It blooms late in the plum season here, and it may cross-pollinate Emerald Beaut - a prized variety of plum. It takes a few years to start blooming, and often blooms on main branches.

Arctic Star white nectarine (the reddish fruit in the picture) are one of breeder  Floyd Zaiger's great family of super-sweet fruits. They can be enjoyed firm-ripe or soft and very sweet. The fruits should be thinned more than I thinned them this year, given ample water until they start to ripen, and protected from insects through dormant spraying, garden cleanup, etc. This will help prevent the bitter almond off-flavors and stunted fruits which can occur in white nectarines.