Blooming Apricot and Peach Trees

In the past week or so, a lot of trees have started blooming in my part of the world, but since I haven't ever taken the time to carefully note when the peach and apricot trees are blooming, I can't remember when they typically bloom. But it seems like mid-March is a little earlier than normal for peach and apricot trees to be blooming.  If we somehow luck out and the temperature doesn't drop below freezing in the next few weeks, there might be a bumper crop of peaches and apricots this summer. 

Apricot trees started blooming a week ago

All the apricot trees were originally a bunch of volunteer trees that came up under an older apricot tree.  Everyone told me it would be a waste of time to transplant them because it was too late in the summer to move trees, they wouldn't grow true to type, the trees would die because they had deep taproots, blah, blah, blah.  Mostly out of sheer stubbornness, I dug up some of those trees, transplanted them, kept them watered through the first summer, and now I get to eat as many apricots as I want to whenever the weather cooperates and they don't get frozen out in the spring.   

Now I wish I'd transplanted each and every one of those volunteer apricot trees because every one of them survived, and each tree is slightly different from the other.  Some trees bloom a few days earlier, some have a slightly bigger apricot, some apricots are sweeter, some have thinner skins, etc.   Every year I always think I should plant some of the fallen apricots in a proper nursery bed to grow some more apricot trees (just in case something happens to these trees), but I always seem to get distracted on another project until it's too late.  Maybe I'll finally remember to get around to it this year.  

Peach trees started blooming a couple of days ago

The peach trees are starting to show their age and I really need to start working on getting a new area ready to plant some new trees next year.  A good thick application of compost, some bio char, a little cover cropping over the summer, and some tree tubes for my new trees should give me much more of a head start compared to how I planted those peach trees years ago. 

I'm hoping that these trees will last a few more years until the new trees can start producing so that I don't have to go peach-less for very long.  I've been planning to plant some new peach trees for a few years, so maybe next year will be the year that I actually follow through on those plans.  It's bad enough when there aren't any peaches because of a late freeze, I'd hate to go peach-less because I didn't get around to planting some new peach trees before the old trees died out completely. 

Bradford pear tree bloomed more than a week ago