Harvest has begun

The Kittseer delicacy is available at the apricot exchange

Karin Darnai and Alexander Roszuczky in the apricot garden.

(Bild: Charlotte Titz)

The Kittsee apricot is ripe! Buyers can order the fruit online. This is an innovation so that nobody has to go home without the orange stone fruit.

There are more than 35,000 apricot trees in Kittsee. Now the fruit is ripe. But once again, the weather has played havoc with the apricot growers. Alexander Roszuczky and Karin Darnai have 4,500 trees and 21 different varieties of the orange stone fruit on their organic farm. Only six varieties are bearing this year.

The main harvest starts next week.

(Bild: Holl Reinhard)

"First the frost caught the blossom, then there were three days of continuous rain with more than 40 millimetres of precipitation," the Kittseer explain.

The best conditions for a fungus that is difficult to control with biological agents. Accordingly, there is little yield this year. Apricot exchange for interested customers. Depending on the location of the trees, the Kittsee apricot trees have between zero and 50 percent of the regular harvest. That's why they've come up with something special for customers this year.

Via the homepage kittseer-marille.at, you can look up which producer currently has ripe fruit for sale in a so-called apricot exchange. "So that you don't drive here and there might not be any left at the stall on the main square," says Roszuczky.

Depending on the producer, apricots cost between 4.50 and 5 euros per kilo this year. The main harvest starts next week. Apricots will then be available until the end of June, perhaps the beginning of July.