Showing in the above photo, is John on the Little Red Beauty and I forget who was on Old Blue....John Deere is in front of them....it is a fairly new tractor. The old one gave out just a few years before this photo was taken. The old one was taken to be worked on and the dealer lent us this one to use while they worked on the old one...Well, it was going to cost so much to fix the old one, they decided to buy this one instead. But first they had to take it back to the shop and put on these small tires. It would not have gone through the orchard in the fall
The Red Beauty is mine...was mine...I have logged many hours and apples and miles on that picker. It has quit on me in more trees than I care to name...I always say I should have had the trees named by the time I left there. I have climbed down the tree more times than I care to count.
There was pruning in the winter, then in the spring sometimes I did thinning by hand. There is a king blossom with other blooms all around it. The king blossom makes an apple first. After those apples from the king blossom are so big, the orchard is sprayed with something to make the other apples fall off. But they don't all fall...and if an apple tree is left with too many apples clustered together, they don't get as big as they would if only an apple or two are left together. So, I ended up going through and pruning by hand.
Also, in the summer is a disease called fireblight...I would make runs through the whole orchard about twice a week cutting out all the fireblight I could find. And before you know it, it is time to start picking apples. The earliest variety we had was the Earliblaze...which is pictured below.
Anyway, I didn't do much today....but in the heat I cannot help but think what I might have been doing were I still working. The above pictures were taken August 10 in 2007....two years after I quit work. That is Earliblaze apples they are picking...so it is possible if I still worked there I would have been picking apples.Though I sort of miss it, I don't miss the extremes of the weather. The heat of the summer, and the cold of the winter. Yet I would not have missed any of it for anything...it was the ideal job for me.
