Slim Pickins

Here's a good lesson to learn: stick with the fruit that is in the prime for its season, do not try to conquer the entirety of fruit orchards. Rick's been way busy, which is a good thing. But trying to schedule a half day with him for our annual cherry picking was becoming a bit challenging. While looking at the orchard schedule I had a (what I thought at the time) bright idea. Why don't we try to get the end of cherry season and the beginning of apricot and peach season? A pang of regret hit me when we passed a few U-Pick cherry orchards with closed signs. I got excited when the one we go to each year was open. As we started to walk through the orchard, we began to realize there would be no easy pickin' here, there was literally no low lying fruit to be found. Up for the challenge, Rick picked 15 pounds of cherries from ladder to ladder, while the rest of us entertained Ava, who wanted to put every cherry pit on the ground into her mouth. End of cherry season, lots of pits on the ground. Piles of pits. It wasn't all a bust though, those were still some tasty bings.

Leaving the cherry orchard, we headed out to another orchard that had apricots, nectarines and peaches. They were still pretty green--would have been perfect in another week or maybe even two-- but this was a much better environment for one eager Sophia itching to pick the fruit from the tree, and one eager Ava chomping at the bit to eat the fruit from the tree. Way easier to give Ava a whole peach and let her go to town. Sometimes she'd be double-fisted with fruit, but at least she wasn't eating discarded pits. As we were leaving the orchard, we noticed the temperature gauge on the car read 104 degrees. It was a hot day, but the shade of the orchard, the delta breeze and sun kissed fresh fruit were a perfect ending to our challenging beginning.