Apricot trees late to leaf or dying?

It’s been a fairly chilly spring here in Northwest Montana and we had record low temps in January (-31 F). My neighbors old apricot trees that border my property are just now showing signs of leaves coming on.

I already figured the apricot trees wouldn’t blossom this year. At this point a few branches have new leaves that just came on a few day’s ago in the warmer weather (80 F). But overall most branches do not have any new leaves.

I’m assuming the trees are under stress from the winter. Maybe they are late to come out of being dormant? Will they recover or is this a sign they are dying?

It's hard to say, because there are many factors that determine the survival rate of apricot trees after an extremely cold winter. For example, older trees do way better than youngsters, and certain varieties of apricot do way better than others. For example, black apricots (from central Asia) and Chinese Sweet Pit/Mormon apricots (from high elevations) are much more winter hardy (zone 4- down to -30 F.) than the more common varieties like Harglow, which are rated for zone 5- down to -20 F.).

Usually, when I want to find out if a dormant tree is really dead, I do a "scratch test". With my fingernail or pocketknife, I scratch a small section of outer bark off a branch or two. If the cambium layer beneath is green, then the tree is usually still alive. If it's dark brown, gray or black, then usually the tree is dead. if the branches look dead, then check the trunk. Trees can often survive if the trunk cambium is still green.

Check out this video from Blaze at Fast Growing Trees for an in depth look on how to do this:



Be sure to update us on what happened with your scratch tests. And good luck with your apricots!

Rose, pretty impressive that you guys can grow apricots.  I guess out of all the fruit trees I have, apricots are the fussiest, and I always give them another year to get over whatever issue they had.   Do the other trees have pollinators, or did the bees take a hit from the cold temps, too?

Mine fuss in the drought, even though I water them.  Then we got enough rain, they all had new shoots, then we got too much rain, they sat in water for at least 3 months, and those shoots didn't get a single leaf.  Some of  the new growth was killed.  I'm hoping they are just stunned into neutral for a year.  

They do tend to pull through eventually.

Our young apricot tree did the same thing in the spring three years ago. The leaves appeared very late and only on two thirds of the branches. We decided to leave it alone hoping it will recover naturally and IT DID. The bare branches remained leafless all that summer but actually they were not dead. I’m glad we adopted the wait-and-see method and did not cut off any of the branches. Now the tree looks great, 100% in leaf. It is 6 years old, no apricots yet.
I hope your neighbor’s trees will recover too.

Hi thank you for your responses. Yes, the apricot trees are very finicky here too and only produce apricots once every few years but we can grow them in this part of the state. The trees next to my house are over 50 years old. The were actually started from seed in the previous owner’s compost pile and then planted. They are pretty overgrown and unkept but we had a great harvest last year.

M.K. thank you for the info! I did the scratch test on a few of the branches that don’t have leaves. A lot of them unfortunately were brown but a some were still green.

And Lillian thank you for the encouragement! I’m so glad to hear that your trees recovered after a year of no leaves! I really hope these will do the same. I will attach a few pictures of the trees. Some trees have more leaves then others.

Even though these are on my neighbors property she lets me harvest the apricots plus I think they are so beautiful. She recently told me I can start tending to them too and do what I think is best for them to survive and be healthier. So after reading your post Lillian, I think I will wait on cutting off any branches until I see how they do next year.

I appreciate all the info here!

We have an old apricot tree (guessing 70 years?)  here in north central Washington that is doing the same thing. It’s been late to leaf, and not all branches have leaves on them. It’s picked up lately with the warmer weather but it’s still pretty bare on some branches. Doing the scratch test, some are alive while a few branches seem brittle and dead. While we didn’t get temps to -30, we did get to -15 one night, which is plenty cold for this neck of the woods. I’ve been wondering if that’s affected our tree as well. I did have a coworker tell me he thinks it’s because we’re thinning the tree instead of properly pruning it. We’ve been leaving most of the older branches and cutting off new growth that interferes with the shape of the tree, overlaps branches etc. His take is that we should be pruning the older growth and not letting the older leader branches get too big. I’ve never been around fruit trees until we moved into this house 3 years ago. This is the first summer we’ve seen this. Do you think the older branches we’ve been neglecting to prune have died and we need to clear way for new growth as my coworker suggested? I’m still researching around before I give it a buzz cut.