APRICOTS IN ABUNDANCE
Generous winter precipitation leaves Santa Fe rolling in fruit this summer
Dozens of apricot empanadas, six apricotapple pies and 24 jars of apricot preserves later, Velma Arellano still has thousands of the pitted fruit weighing down trees in her front yard.
“They can get out of control,” she says with a laugh, gazing up at unripened clusters growing overhead, dodging one juicy orb as it falls to the ground.
Arellano says she rakes her yard and the sidewalk surrounding her house on Camino Santa Ana three times a day, gathering bags full of apricots to
create a variety of concoctions in her kitchen. She also donates the fruit to nursing homes, gives it to neighbors and allows strangers to collect it to feed their goats and chickens. And still there is still more. Apricots, Arellano notes, “are my life right now.” She’s not alone. Santa Fe, for perhaps the first time in years, is awash in a sweet, sticky, gooey, ohmy-goodness-what-are-we-gonna-do-ey mess. Apricots are everywhere. “It’s bittersweet, because there’s so many, you can’t even give ’em away,” says Alicia Moreno, who lives near the city’s south side. “I call people who normally come get ’em [from our house], and they say, ‘Oh, we already have some.’ ”
Moreno, who has made nine jars of apricot butter and a homemade cobbler, says this summer has
brought “the most [apricots] in 40 years.”
“I’ve never seen so many in all my life,” she says. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with all of them. … I’m afraid most of them will go to waste.”
Experts say generous snow and rain in the winter — and the absence of a bud-killing freeze in the spring — created the apricot extravaganza.
“The really, really really big thing is no frost,” says Ellen Premack, a member of the Santa Fe Extension Master Gardeners Association. “When there’s no frost, the apricot buds don’t fall off the trees, but the thing that probably made more apricots is the moisture.”
For some, like Arellano and Moreno, it’s a boon. For others, it’s a bust — the rotting smell and mushy mess are, well, the pits.
In parts of town rife with apricot trees, the fruit can be found mashed up on streets and sidewalks, sometimes crushed so badly it appears a layer of jam has been smeared across the concrete and asphalt. Along sections of Cerro Gordo Road, piles accumulate at hairpin turns, with a random apricot or two seen rolling down a hill. And in some places, including one small compound on Canyon Road, the pungent, too-sweet smell fills the air as flies circle the fruit and ants crawl onto the oozing goop.
“It’s a pain in the butt right now,” one of the compound’s residents, Joan Potter, says. “You can’t walk anywhere without squishing ’em.”
John Tafoya, a Camino Cabra resident, remembers recent years when no one could squish an apricot because they really weren’t around. This year’s harvest, he says, is a blessing.
In 2018, he says, his family saw a single apricot dangle from one of his three trees — “and the birds ate it before I got it.”
In the five to six years before that, his harvest was nowhere near what it is this summer. This year, his trees runneth over and he gives away bags full of the fruit.
Meanwhile, “Everybody else just lets them rot out,” he says.
The mess and the bugs, however, aren’t the only problems.
Ana Padilla, raised on Upper Canyon Road with a large apricot tree, worries that too much of the fruit can bring bears, as she remembers during her childhood.
“You would find bear scat with apricot pits everywhere,” she says. “Our driveway was an absolute carpet of apricots.”
Some people seem uncertain about what do with the bounty, Premack says. She suggests freezing the fruit for juice, bringing donations to homeless shelters and posting on Craigslist or neighborhood forums to invite people to come pick the fruit.
Arellano fills bags to bring to the Sierra Vista Retirement Community and the Vista Hermosa assisted living facility, where she works.
And of course, she says, there’s always the option of baking — a lot of baking.
Arellano says as soon as she started hearing the apricots drop on the roof of her house — “I hear clunk clunk clunk every few seconds. … Every night, it’s thump thump thump,” she says — she started collecting the the fruit for apple-apricot pastelitos, or little pies, plus cobblers and smoothies. She even just smothers them on breakfast toast.
Moreno says she used about 20 cups of apricots last week to make a cobbler and another 26 cups for enough apricot butter to last the year.
For those not interested in butters and desserts, apricot fan Marti Millis suggests something a bit more experimental: fermentation.
Thus far, Millis has already used about 1,000 apricots to make a large batch of apricot wine and two big cans of a lacto-fermented chutney, which she says is loaded with probiotics beneficial to the immune system. She also grills the fruit to serve atop steak or salmon.
“We have this opportunity right now to make delicious foods,” she says.
For Arellano, this time of year reminds her of her mother, Mary Arellano, who died in April. She was a true apricot lover.
“She never let a single one go to waste,” Arellano says. “It’s very emotional but extremely rewarding. … This is a sure way to stay connected to the beautiful gem she was.”
If you listen closely, you can almost hear a thump, thump, thump.
It’s the sound of summer in Santa Fe.