The History of 2010 Apricots

Yes it really came with a bang and our harvest of the apricots is finished. Withoeks production of apricots is much lower than last season. The contributing factors is because of the frost in August - bloom time.
Some of the lower orchards didn't even reach a tonne per ha. After everything added and done our harvest seems to be down by about 40%.
The dried fruit prices also gone south and so we decided to cut our losses and dry much less. The quality of the fruit which we did dry was much better than previous seasons and it shows in the dried fruit quality. The colour is really good and because of the early finish we could do the right thing and get it of the stellations much quicker which means higher water content in the fruit - thus it would be heavier and fuller. Much more attractive product.

Because of the dry weather our vineyards is very healthy and we sprayed this week which might be our last one. Our young vines need some attention and we plan to get to it in the next week or two.

The peaches we are also selling to the canner because of the world wide overproduction of dried peaches. We are lucky when one of the canners closed their depot in Calitzdorp another opened one. The prices is also lower than last year but atleast we do have a buyer. The peach size is a bit disappointing but could be contributed to micro element shortages. I picked it way to late and are spraying like mad to get it back but I think I might have lost this season fruit. In Calitzdorp we usually don't spray to much of the micro element but with peaches you must actually be very aware of it. The peach is a plant which easily shows such shortages and or toxic highs of micro elements.