This afternoon I had a fun time helping harvest and prepare apricots for drying.

Of course we started by picking the apricots that we were going to dry. We had to make sure that the apricots were soft enough so that they would have good sugar content.

We loaded the mule up with apricots as we picked them and when we had enough we headed back to the barn.

We dumped the apricots into a large container of water to clean them. We then used colanders to dip out bunches of apricots for processing. Each apricot was cut in half and the kernel was removed. The halves were then placed on a drying tray.

This is one of the refuse buckets, you can see that many kernels were removed. The apricot kernels do have some interesting properties, but I won’t list them here.

Here is a full drying tray, on to the next one. We ended up with four full drying trays this afternoon.

Here you can see the four trays that we filled. They are now ready for the next step in the drying process.

The trays are tented and are now ready to be fumigated with sulfur. Sulfur is used to kill micro-organisms and also help preserve the color of the fruit.

A can with sulfur powder is placed in the tent and burned for two to three hours to fumigate the fruit. A pair of bellows is used to help start the sulfur on fire. Once the sulfur powder starts to burn it has a blue flame. This reminds me of high school Chemistry lab experiments.

Sulfur is also one of those interesting words with a different UK spelling. In the UK it is spelled sulphur.

An earlier batch of apricots were on drying trays and were slowly dehydrating in the California sun. Luckily, we were working in the shade and had a nice breeze so we did not dehydrate.

Here is a closeup of the apricots that have been drying for a couple of days. You can see that they are slowly shrinking in size as they dehydrate.

I am looking forward to tasting the fruits of my labor.

Steven