People say this all the time and boy was it true for us in 2020, Every time I turned around it felt like I had to learn something new because I never thought of that or never expected it. 2020 was our trial year as in 2019 our entire apricot crop was destroyed due to a late frost, NOT ONE SINGLE APRICOT on nearly 200 trees. This year we were conservative, just hoping we would get a few apricots to see how healthy the trees were and what kind of crop we may expect in future years. We were blown away by the amount of apricots we got!! We made sure to thin out the trees, all by hand because we did learn that if you did not your trees could be biennial producers and we didn't want that. I felt horrible throwing so much away but it had to be done. Next up was the apricot fungus due to all the wet weather we had this spring...well we quickly learned that you needed to spray for that, although the fruit was still edible it sure didn't look nice. Next was the pruning technique, we did not prune the suckers off the top of the trees in the spring so the sunlight wasn't able to penetrate to all of the fruit so not everything ripened as it should. Next came the earwigs....oh the earwigs, we never sprayed pesticide and did not want to so we quickly put tanglefoot and tape onto the trees to capture what we could but we lost lots of fruit there too. What we learned from July to August will definitely help us next year! However, we were still able to get loads of fruits off the trees and make lots of sales this year and what we couldn't sell we decided to make into jam. Only problem there is I had never made jam before. After about 50 jars of slight success I finally figured it all out for all the different types of fruit we had. What the proper canning times were and the exact right temperature that pectin will set. Who knew it was that scientific! What we now have is our own line of jams and pie fillings so success! We would like to thank everyone who offered their advice to us this year and to every person who purchased our products. What a crazy season and I hope 2021 is less of you don't know what you don't know and more of I learned that last year so I am ready!
