Check them often, they can turn to ripe overnight. Also, not all fruits ripen on the tree at the same time. I usually pick twice a day (morning and evening) to get fruit at optimal ripeness. An apricot tree is usually harvested in 7 to 10 days, depending on variety and tree size.
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Yes, and apricots are best to me when juicy. They vary sometimes site to site, but at both of our sites Tomcot is too dry. Too bad, it is a beautiful cot. It also doesn’t seem to sauce well. I love to cook cots in the micro as a saucy base for other fruits with waffles. My main crop will start coming from my much larger and older Alfred in a few days. I look forward to it. I’m sure there are better cots than Alfred- it’s relatively small and susceptible to scab. I probably should try to graft some Orange-red to it because the couple of them I’ve tasted have been quite juicy. The prime wall real estate now occupied by a fig will probably go to an Early Blush so I might have cots much earlier than even TC.
Anyone else out there find Tomcot to be a relatively dry apricot.
I had two Tomcots that made it! I ate them today. Very tasty but not as juicy as last year!
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I find Tomcot on the dry side as well. I like them that way, they seem to have more flavor due to lack of water. This year they were too small, I didn’t thin enough.
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They are highly flavored, but so are my Alfreds and other varieties I’ve tasted at other sites. With the dry mid-spring on here, even the unripe Early-glow I took from a client’s tree had high flavor- and that was about June 10th!
But honestly, I need to have success in my orchard with many more varieties for many more seasons to be at all expert on east coast cots. This is only my second season harvesting Toms on my property- don’t think I got more than 50.
My one Tomcot finally dropped to the ground yesterday. I then, picked a few more. Most came off easily.
Here’s the pics of before and after bathing.
Surround came off easier than I expected. Brix was 16.5 but we felt they were sweet and pleasant. Really nice.
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good size，good looking，very likely good taste too
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Annie,
They did taste really good. For this year, this is the time I picked Tomcot. We had 90+ F for 5 days last week. That could have contributed to its ripening time.
One Orangered dropped today. So, sofar Tomcot, followed by Orangered. Next should be Robada. I hope my one and only Zard hangs on until its ripening time.
So far, we picked about 4 lbs of Tomcot. We should get about 6+ lbs total… Average weight was over 1.5 oz. The biggest one was over 2 oz. Brix has been around 16-17.
@mrsg47, @BobVance, @SMC_zone6 , et al,
How’s your apricots?
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Yayyyyyy for you! Mine are finished. No four pounds here!
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Those look amazing. You are making me reconsider my decision to give up on apricots in favor of other trees!
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It is totally possible pray for sun and no frost in spring and tend your Orchard like Tippy!
Holly,
Hope you don’t think I’ve hijacked your thread 
. I am so excited that after 2 consecutive years of apricots being wiped out by freeze, this is the year.
They are excellent as far as apricots go. Exceed my expectation. Sweet and tasty and Orangered seemed to be aromatic.
I definitely would strongly encourage you to plant or graft Tomcot or Orangered. I don’t want to plant an apricot tree due to a sudden death issue. Grafting it to peach trees is the way to go for me.
Very tasty. But very few. I had three trees die (Montrose crushed under snow, and Autumn Glo and OrangeRed for no apparent reason (the usual for apricots)). The two Amidocots which remained on the tree both rotted. In the end, I was left with a single branch on a 3-4’ tall Goldcot tree.
Shockingly, none of the fruit was swiped by animals. I picked 3 on July 5th and let them sit on the counter for a few days. I tried them on the 8th and as soon as I realized they were good, I went back out and got the last two (the two larger ones seen below). I’m not sure if I just picked the smaller ones first, if the remaining ones grew in the 3 days, or the first ones I picked shrank due to dehydration on the counter. But there was a decent size difference…
I won’t put them at “amazing” (not like a 22 brix nectarine), but they were very good, especially for this time of year. But, I am getting some amazing store bought fruit from CA/WA (nectarines and cherries), so I’m not really missing all the apricots I could have picked. I even found some organic apricots at Whole Foods which were almost baseball sized and similar tasting to mine.
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Whether apricots are worth growing depends a lot on specific sites. I can’t seem to get production out in the open on my property, but against the sunny walls of my house they are quite productive. My customers right next to the Hudson River get fruit most years, but their trees are still fragile even though their lows are 10 degrees higher than mine and swings must be much less as well because the Hudson is like a lake that doesn’t freeze where those trees are.
I have a customer where a Hargrand lasted 15 years and bore heavy crops most of those years. For about 8 years, other Harrow Station varieties flourished and bore as well but eventually died. This season killed all the trees, it looks like, unless the wilty looking Hargrand rebounds. It had a heavy crop that is over now. The other trees never came out of dormancy. His site never got below -10F, and that was when trees were in deepest slumber with no warm spells to make them soft. They had all survived what should have been harsher conditions in the past. At other sites I’ve had trees die when winter temps didn’t even fall below 0.
It takes 15 years to evaluate a site, but after a harvest, we all tend to think success will continue. Apricots will never be a money maker in my bearing age fruit tree nursery. Too many die during first years and right after installation. I’m going to stop guaranteeing them even the first season- I would stop offering them if they weren’t my sentimental favorites- my first fruit tree was an apricot in S. CA, that is likely flourishing today. It’s probably over 60 as it was alive when my family moved there in '63.
Bob,
I have not eaten any good store bought aprocots but I have never bought them from Whole Food, either. I bought them from Wegman’s, Trader Joe’s, other local supermarkets and an Indian grocery store. I let them sit for days. Unfortunately, none was worth the money. Same is true with my experience with peaches and nectarines. We have Whole Food but I have never shopped there for fruit yet.
Bob and @alan, you guys’ accounts on how easy apricot trees died are very discouraging. The many grafts I made on my peach and nectarine trees have grown very vigorously, more than the host trees. Too bad that growing it in ground is so risky where we are. Otherwise, I would want to grow a whole tree now that I know how good home grown apricots can be.
Apricots are my second fruit from cherries. After this, I won’t have anything substantial from my orchard until August. I need to find early ripening peaches and other fruit to fill in late July.
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Your site may be good. Half sites I grow them a couple of trees do fine.
WF doesn’t always have organic apricots. I went to a different WF than normal and noticed them this time. Next time I’m around there, I’ll check to see if it is a regular thing.
I just had the last WF and the last homegrown apricots. This WF one didn’t match up to the others. Probably because it was the least ripe (and why I left it the longest). The WF apricot was only 13 brix, while mine was 16, with more flavor (and a bit less size…).
Fruit is the main thing to get there, at least from my perspective. They have had some incredible nectarines in the last month and a half. Both white and yellow have been great, but not always. Focus on the ones with the sugar speckles and you won’t go wrong. They’ve been over 20 brix, sometimes into the 23-24 range.
Maybe it takes less than that if the evaluation is that it is bad… I’ve lost so many apricot trees over the last 5-6 years that I almost feel cruel to the tree to plant it here 
You’ve convinced me. I’ll put a couple trees against the South facing rock wall. I don’t have any spots on my house, due to a deck, but I suspect a 8’ tall rock wall would serve the same function. So far, I’ve had a persimmon there, on the premise that it would help it survive the winter. It still dies back each year, often close to the ground.
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Good point about evaluating.
I’m afraid a rock wall might not help. My house isn’t very well insulated and I’m not sure if escaped heat doesn’t help the trees out. They certainly flower sooner than trees in the open.
I don’t know if my site is good for apricot trees or not. I am not willing to plant one in ground.
I think it is best for me to just graft varieties I want on my peach
/nectarine trees. So far, I have 5 varieties, 8 grafts on 3 trees.
I don’t think the peach roots and trunk will likely alter the toughness of their wood, so you will find out about the site one way or the other, I’m guessing.
I’m only sharing my bafflement about their unpredictability- as I do fairly often here.
One thing I learned new this season is that Moongold and Sungold are a lot better tasting apricots than I expected. A client planted a pair years ago very close to the Hudson river not knowing anything about the Har series or other presumably better tasting cots. Both trees are way overloaded with fruit but still have decent size and good flavor.
They are supposed to survive in Z4!
Of course, I can’t really be sure that the trees are true to name- I’ve no idea where they were purchased. I should ask him- he’s an engineer (he invented and owns the patent on the device you stick in your mouth every time you get a dental X-ray). I expect he recorded the source and has the info carefully filed.
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