Apricot: fruit splitting or cracking

What it is likely to be on apricot

1. Brown rot

   Candidate 1common on this plant

   ·source

   Sourced guidancehigh confidence

   • Royal Horticultural Society: Brown rot
   • Home and Garden Information Center — Clemson Cooperative Extension: Peach diseases — brown rot

   Checked 2026-08-13

   Fruit turning brown and soft with concentric rings of buff pustules, often while still hanging. Affected fruit shrivels into a hard 'mummy' that stays on the tree over winter and infects next year's crop from where it hangs.

   Points towards it

   • · buff-grey pustules form in concentric rings on the rotting surface, which no water split and no scab produces
   • · it moves between fruit that are touching, so it appears in clusters rather than scattered through the tree
   • · warm damp weather through ripening is what lets it spread

   Argues against it

   • · damage appearing evenly across the whole tree in one night is weather rather than a fungus spreading by contact

   Check this next

   Look at what the affected fruit is touching, and look for last year's fruit still hanging. Brown rot spreads by contact, so it turns up in clusters with a shrivelled blackened mummy at the centre, and the rot is soft and brown with rings of buff pustules standing proud of the skin. A weather split is scattered wherever fruit happened to ripen first, and the flesh at the edge of the crack stays firm and pale. Wounds from wasps, birds and scab cracks are how it gets in, so the two often appear together on the same fruit.

   What to do now

   Remove every rotting fruit and — more importantly — every shrivelled mummy still hanging on the tree through winter, and put them in the bin rather than the compost heap. Those mummies are where the fungus overwinters and clearing them does more than anything else available to a home grower. Thin the crop so fruit does not touch, and handle ripening fruit gently, since almost every infection starts at a wound.

   ·source

   Sourced guidancehigh confidence

   • Royal Horticultural Society: Brown rot — control

   Checked 2026-08-13

2. Fruit splitting

   Candidate 2occasional on this plant

   ·source

   Horticultural consensusmoderate confidence

   • Royal Horticultural Society: Peaches and nectarines — problems
   • Home and Garden Information Center — Clemson Cooperative Extension: Peach — fruit cracking and split pit

   Checked 2026-08-13

   Fruit splitting open on the plant, usually after rain following a dry spell. Nothing is attacking it: the inside has taken up water faster than the skin can grow, and the skin gives way. The split then lets brown rot in, which is where the real loss comes from.

   Points towards it

   • · rain in the final swelling stage pushes water into fruit whose skin has already stopped expanding
   • · it is rain onto ripening fruit that does it

   Argues against it

   • · fruit ripened under cover and kept dry has not had the water event that causes this — this rules it out entirely.
   • · pustules on the split surface make this a rot rather than a water split

   Check this next

   Check how close the fruit was to ripe and whether the split runs along the suture. Stone fruit splits in the last week or two before picking, along the natural seam or around the stone, and a fruit still hard and green does not split whatever the weather does. A split that appeared much earlier, with the stone itself divided and the cavity open, is split pit — a crop-load and early-thinning problem rather than a rain one, and commonest on early cultivars carrying too heavy a set.

   What to do now

   Pick split fruit at once and use it, and pick the sound fruit as soon as it comes ready rather than leaving it on for a few last days of sweetness — that fortnight is when the risk sits. A fan-trained tree against a wall can be kept dry through ripening with a temporary cover, which is the only reliable prevention. Thinning early to one fruit every 15 cm reduces split pit the following season.

   ·source

   Sourced guidancemoderate confidence

   • Royal Horticultural Society: Peaches — thinning

   Checked 2026-08-13

Narrow it down

This page lists everything at once, which is the right shape for reading and the wrong shape for deciding. The interactive tool asks one question at a time, starting with whichever would separate these causes fastest, and stops as soon as further answers would not help.

Opens with the plant and the symptom already set. Nothing you answer is stored or sent anywhere — the answers live in the address bar and nowhere else.

What this does not cover

These are the causes GrowingHQ holds rules for on apricot — not every cause there is. Where several problems look alike, the honest answer is often that they cannot be told apart by eye, and a page that named one would be guessing. If none of the above fits, the general fruit splitting or cracking page lists causes across all plants, and the Apricot profile lists the problems it is prone to.