The apricots are ripe!

I came home late from work last night, around 8 pm, weary after a long day, and found that the apricots had ripened. Richard had picked three, and they were sitting on the kitchen counter. I wrote earlier this spring about anticipation. Now came the time of tasting.

There's a certain excitement the first time a new fruit or vegetable is ready to eat for the first time. That's especially true for tree fruit that requires 3-5 years of patient (or impatient) waiting for the first harvest. Last year was the first we had apricots, and we had only a few that made it to maturity. So I didn't remember just where they fit in the summer cycle. Each day, for a couple of weeks now, I've been out there checking. I picked two late last week, but they they weren't quite ripe yet.

These were perfect. Out of the forty or so fruit that formed from pollinated flowers in the spring, only about twenty will ripen. The others dropped -- probably because the tree was still too young to support that many. But my handy reference, The Backyard Orchardist, tells me that, if all goes well, we should eventually get 50 to 100 pounds of fruit from the tree.

Interestingly, although apricots look like small peaches enough that their "family" relationship is obvious, they are also closely related botanically to plums. My reference book tells me that some interesting crosses of the two -- called apriums and pluots -- are now becoming available.

Fruit trees -- carefully chosen for varieties suited to one's climate and least likely to have major pest or disease problems -- are a relatively low-maintenance way to begin to build an edible landscape. And there's a long, albeit no longer common, tradition of planting fruit trees in a home's yard. Down the road from me is an old, hand-dug and stone-lined foundation from an old farmhouse. A friend, on a walk one day, recognized its presence from the apple trees (and lilacs and day lilies) that still grow there. All were regularly planted in the yard.

This past weekend, my great-aunt Rita told me that her father grew fruit trees (pears, and others that she didn't remember) in their small, urban yard in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Like their neighbors, many of whom were also immigrants from rural Russia, they raised chickens and garden vegetables as well. A butcher by profession, my great-grandfather was a good gardener, she said.

In recent decades, fruiting trees have been supplanted by sterile "flowering" varieties in most home landscapes. There seemed to be some appeal to not having to "clean up" the dropped fruit from the yard, or sort through those that have been too damaged by insects to eat. And, of course, unsprayed fruit at home, while tastier than anything found in the store, does not have the blemish-free appearance that most U.S. consumers expect. Nor is it available year round. But as our "taste test" last night confirmed, a return to growing fruit in the yard -- and eating it fresh off the tree -- more than makes up for that.