It sure was with sadness that I read Tom and Imac are retiring from the team. They have been an encouragement to me in blogland.
Now to my post for today...I worked for years at an apple orchard. The picker on the left side of the row of trees was my picker for years. (that is not me on it.) If I am out there to visit, it is still my machine. The tractor pictured is not the tractor I started with...it is only about 7 years old as I speak. It was bought new, ordered with tires as small as they come till it would fit through the trees when they are loaded down with apples.
These are just a few of the apple trees...the ones above are some of the younger trees. I probably helped set some of them. The orchard is a small orchard--it had about 2,000 trees. In those 2,000 trees we had 20+ varieties.
favorite job I ever did out there, or maybe for all time, was grafting. I felt like I was creating something...but I sure loved picking and didn't mind the pruning except sometimes the cold got to me. When I was pruning I felt like an artist at work.
The above was the the first variety picked at our orchard; they are EarliBlaze. And the ones below are Blushing Golden, picked a bit past mid season and they are probably my favorite apple.
These below are Arkansas Black...they were picked at the very end of October, and at that time we only had the Granny Smith apples to pick after, though we did plant some Pink Ladies before I quit, and they have an even longer growing season that the Grannies, as we called them.
The Arkansas Blacks are gourmet cooking apples...but a lot of people love them because they are so hard and crisp.I hope you enjoyed seeing a little bit of where I spent years of my life. The orchard is still a working orchard, and I still visit every now and then.
