Organic Dried Apricots

As mentioned by director of operations, Victor Martino, "it takes good fruit to make good dried fruit." Here you can see the harvesting of our apricots. When we harvest apricots we don't pick all the fruit on a tree at once. We only pick the good ripe fruit. We will come back to a tree many times before all the fruit is picked.

Because we grow our own fruit, we can control the quality of our dried fruit from the time the tree is planted up to the time the fruit is shipped to your door.

The bins of fruit are taken to the barn and rolled right off the gradual slope of the trailer

Here's our little two ton truck I got to drive for quick pickups. This neat old forklift, made from an airport tug, gets the job done in no time.

The fruit is taken right to the apricot slicing machine. Here Jose guards it well.

The bins of apricots are loaded to the apricot slicer's hopper that is full of water. Director of operations, Victor Martino, wastes no time getting the truck unloaded and feeding the apricot slicer.

Here's another job they threw me on. The forklift driver doesn't stop for one second, except to take a picture. The hopper constantly needs another bin of fruit. Then on the other side of the slicer machine, the fruit is coming out on trays nonstop. The full trays need to be taken away and empty trays are fetched from the other side of the yard. Before you can put another bin of apricots in the hopper, you need to get rid of the empty one and stack them perfectly 8 high. It gave a whole new meaning to "drive it like you stole it."

Here is the hopper full of water and apricots.

An elevator brings apricots to a sorting table where any trash is thrown out. The sorters are also looking for over-ripe apricots. Over-ripe apricots are very sweet and make some of the best dried apricots. That is where Slab Apricots come from. Over-ripe apricots are placed in boxes to be sliced by hand and layed on trays at the end of the day. They are my favorite!

After the apricots run across the sorter, they fall on a mechanism that finds the top and bottom of the apricot and then slices it in half.

After the machine slices the apricots in half, the apricots fall onto the drying trays and are placed face up to dry in the sun.

2 to 4 days later, depending on how hot it is, the fruit is dried and brought back in.

I hope you enjoyed your tour through our farm at
Bella Viva Orchards. Michael Colombo