It’s apricot season and I’ve been picking lots! It’s unusual to get apricots here in Santa Fe (about every 7 years for me) as usually a late freeze comes in spring and freezes all the blossoms, but not this year!
I have a wonderful apricot jam recipe that has St. Germain’s liquor in it. St Germain’s is a liquor made out of elderberries and is delicious by itself but when added to apricot jam while cooking, it gives a wonderful floral nuance to the jam that is delicious. So I am excited to make more this year as I’m down to my last jar of apricot jam. The recipe can be found here.
Wow, what a fruit season it’s been so far-first mega strawberries, then thousands of cherries, now apricots and my neighbor has salmonberries now and coming up right behind will be raspberries and blackberries in another month and then apples in the fall.
AND we haven’t even gotten to the veggies being produced right now but that’s for another post!
giantveggiegardener 
Hey! Can I trade some Apricot Liqueur for a jar of jam?
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sure!
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Apricots used to be the most abundant of fruits produced in the formerly vast orchards of the Santa Clara Valley. I grew up with the last of them.
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So what happened to the apricot orchards in Santa Clara Valley?
In Santa Fe, we only have apricot trees in people’s personal gardens-no big orchard groves of anything. We don’t get that many apricot harvests because we usually get a freeze in late spring which wipes out the blossoms so this year is an especially nice year that the whole city is getting lots of apricots. I get a crop about every 7-8 years so I just think of my 2 apricot trees as nice shade trees–to get apricots is a bonus. Now I ended up making 31 jars of jam which I will give many of them away as gifts. And yes the work was overwhelming!
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The Santa Clara Valley, which was also known as the Valley of Heart’s Delight is where San Jose grew into the tenth most populous city in America. The Santa Clara Valley was assigned another name that we natives do not like to mention. It is not some of the most expensive real estate in American, and ridiculously crowded by people who are very different from what we knew. Some of us native still grow apricots and other fruits that were were familiar with, and they are very reliable. I could not bear to grow them if they were not reliable.
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