Apricot Tree

[Nadia]

Hi, my Apricot dwarf tree has not blossomed this year   ???  Last year I had only 2 Apricots.  The tree is in a pot, as my other dwarf fruit trees.  My peach tree is doing well and I thought both come from the same family !!  I cover my trees during winter for protection.

What is the best way to look after an Apricot tree?

Thanks
Nadia

[Nadia]

[jennym]

You don't say how old your apricot tree is, or whether you have pruned it, and what you are feeding it with.
Apricot and peach are similar, and many folks find that relatively new trees appear to blossom and fruit for the first year or two that they have them, and then in subsequent years they seem to have fewer blossoms/fruit.
Assuming you are feeding it with a good quality feed that contains trace elements, and assuming you are keeping the trees very well watered in the growing season, the problem could be that the flowers, which tend to come early, are getting frosted and dropping quickly. The colder you can keep them in the spring, the later they will flower and might avoid some of the worst frosts.
Sometimes they fail to flower well due to pruning.
These trees tend to produce fruit on the fresh shoots that have grown on the main branches the previous year. So, if you've cut these off, you may not get fruit.
In the same way, if you haven't got many fresh shoots from last year, you won't get so much fruit. You can encourage a supply of fresh shoots (on a tree under cover) in late winter/early spring by cutting back some of the older shoots on the main branches in winter to about half their length. The fruit will come on shoots that grew the previous year, and you will have encouraged shoots to grow for the next year's fruit too. After fruiting, cut out the fruited shoots and leave the new ones.
For trees grown in the open, in late summer after fruiting, cut back the new shoots that have grown in current year to about half their length, and cut out old fruited shoots. If there many new shoots, also cut out about a quarter of these, the rest will benefit from having more room.

[Nadia]

Hello Jenny
Thanks for the advice and shall look at it carefully.
Regards
Nadia