ONE SUMMER DAY, walking down a quiet back street in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, I saw a 30-foot-tall apricot tree practically weighed down with ripe fruit. A low branch hung within easy reach, so I climbed a little way up into the tree and spent an unforgettable fifteen minutes eating one after another perfectly ripe apricot. Their flesh was orange and full of sweet juice. They had a rich perfume and a luscious flavor that became my standard of apricot quality ever since.

Some years later, I grew two apricot trees on my own property—a Moongold and a Sungold. Each year they flowered and each year brown rot took all the fruit before it ripened. But that same apricot in Emmaus (about 10 miles away) would be full of spotless ripe fruit! Why hadn’t the brown rot infected it? Then one year, my two apricots unexpectedly bore crops of healthy fruit. Hooray—but why?

After some sleuthing, I discovered that the conditions in Emmaus—with yards of grass and asphalt streets—gave the brown rot fungus no place to build up, whereas my country property was a cleared meadow surrounded by woods where the fungus was plentiful. I also found out that apricots must ripen on the tree. If wet weather settles in when that fruit is ripening and beginning to soften, the rot will be able to proliferate. If it stays hot and dry—midsummer conditions—the fruit may avoid the rot. Some years are apricot years and some aren’t my trees were just having a good year.