Good evening,

Apricots are having a take over of the Cherry Chatter today!

Today we've been busy picking MagicCot variety apricots. An early variety, with some great colour and size. These apricots are really so different to what you usually see in shops.

Here in Mudgee - these will be for sale tomorrow (Saturday) morning at the Mudgee Farmers Markets. We'll also have a few punnets of early cherries and jars of our popular Pickled Cherries.

Apricots also available at Craddock's butchery Narrabri - we'll drop in a top up next week if yesterday's load has sold out already.

If our later varieties of apricots are still ripening the same time as our cherry runs we'll be able to bring apricots on those runs too. Very hard to predict - the apricots flowered much earlier than the cherries this season.

There are quite a few with some wind damage marks where they have rubbed against branches. Not perfect but ideal for apricot sauce, jam, cooking, freezing - and oh so much easier to pit than cherries! These second grade are also available for sale tomorrow.

An absolute favourite in our home is apricot BBQ sauce - I use this recipe for Apricot sauce by The Spruce Eats, usually I replace the chill with some home smoked chipotle. It's superb!

Cherries

The late frosts and cooler nights this week are slowing down the ripening of the cherries, yet the days are warming up. It's quite difficult to predict when the cherries will ripen if the cooler nights hold. The good thing about cooler nights is it gives the cherries some more time to grow extra size. The frosts were are more of a worry for the vineyards around us which are at flowering stage.

We have carefully colour picked through a few trees of early cherry varieties that we've been trialling. A few punnets of our first cherries will make it to the Mudgee Farmers markets tomorrow. Smaller size than usual but some good flavour.

Pick Your Own Cherries

With this unpredictable weather we'll wait another week before we open bookings for pick your own cherries. At this stage we are still hoping to open the season the first week of December, with more cherries ripening after that.

New this season for pick your own we have brought in these cutest little kids picking pails. They will be available to buy at the farm - ready for kids to pick into and be able to take home their very own 'special cherries". Holding around 800g cherries they are also handy if you want to manage the budget of how much your kids pick.

Hope to see you around this season

Ingrid & Guy Roth