Garden Plot: Home-grown fruits, veggies boast stand-out flavor

Blenheim apricot trees produce the best-tasting apricot around. In a good year they can produce a lot of fruit, which can be eaten, canned or dehydrated. (Diane Lynch / For The Ark)

Some years my little Blenheim apricot tree produces more than 100 apricots, so I’ve made jam from most of them. It turns out that chilling hours are important to flavor and mine don’t get the requisite number of hours below 45 degrees or enough hot sun, both of which translate to much less flavor. Blenheims, sometimes called royals, are just the best apricot you can eat. Nothing else in the apricot world even comes close. In their quest for profit, Whole Foods recently decided to not label their fruit by cultivar anymore — someone has to eat the bland ones, I guess.

The nice thing about apricots is that they can be canned beautifully, without peeling, so you just remove the pits and don’t have to go through dunking them in a boiling cauldron of water like you do with tomatoes and peaches. You could even dry them if you have a dehydrator, and you’ll have the authentic California dried apricots that used to be grown up near the delta before they started growing subdivisions there.

Read the complete story in our e-edition, or SUBSCRIBE NOW for home delivery and access to the digital replica.