When a long time friend calls you up out of the blue and gives you the opportunity to pick his organic orchard you can’t say no! So we hurried our preparations and headed to Quincy, WA at 3 AM. Picking fruit on a 12′ ladder with a fruit box strapped to your chest turned out to not be the easiest thing I have ever done. It’s hard work! My parents and many other adults their age tells stories of being bused to the strawberry fields in Puyallup, WA when they were just young kids. They made a few dollars, or quarters and got to eat all the strawberries they wanted. I think it would be great to have such a program for our High School students in the orchards of Eastern Washington. It could really teach them a thing or two!
We loaded up our truck with 60 boxes or so of fresh peaches, nectarines and plums and headed back to Seattle. The peaches were a huge hit, many clients were excited to get their hands on a box or 5 boxes or quality organic peaches! In the future if we can build out cold storage at Restoring Eden we could do this with even greater success.
One thing interesting to note is the spacing of the fruit trees in an orchard setting. Most people are planting semi-dwarf trees about 12′ apart. In this particular orchard they were more like 6′ apart and had more of an upright growth pattern. This pattern can and should be transferred over to our urban settings where space is scarce.
