So we ran out of bags again, despite the fact that I cleared all the bags out from the foodbank when I dropped off the donation from last Sunday. Thankfully, my Mom's obsession with Amazon has paid off with the number of boxes we were able to use for yesterday's picking!
We headed back out to Bel Marin Keys to finish up the house with the three apples from last week pretty early in the morning because one of my volunteers had to get to an appointment by 12:30-ish. We all got coffee and I got called a sociopath for taking my coffee black—I'm sorry I just like it!
We got another 291 lbs of apples this round, so added to the prior 561 lbs that's about 850 lbs of apples, which is insane. The three trees didn't even look that large but they produced so many apples! There were branches that were weighed down by nine apples in one place, so when we picked them the branch sprang back up. We slingshotted some apples into the neighbor's yard doing that by accident. We managed to clear all of the apples this trip, so that's another house that's taken care of! I think they've set the record for the house that has donated the most amount of fruit that Fruits of Labor volunteers have actually gone out and picked!
We went by for a second sweep of the figs because the houses were literally 4 minutes away from each other—I am actually getting to know Marin so much better just driving from house to house on Fruits of Labor picking trips—and got about 20 lbs from them. I will never stop complaining about the sap that comes from fig trees. Even though it doesn't particularly bother me, the stinging/itchy sensation is still really irritating.
We dropped my volunteer off and grabbed some lunch before heading to the third house, who had a really, REALLY tall apple tree. Like, so tall only our longest picker could reach 2/3 up the tree. And unfortunately, all of the best apples (and the majority of them) were in the top half of the tree. So to remedy this shortcoming I... drum roll please... climbed the tree.
I was so high I was almost scared for my life, I will be honest. But I've gotten so good at wedging myself between leaves and hooking my limbs around branches that I was pretty comfortable hanging out up there. I think I spent at least an hour and a half without ever touching the ground. But once again, worth it, because we got so many apples Mom had to drive home, unload, scrounge up more cardboard boxes, and return for us to have enough containers to transport everything that we picked. We ended up with over 100 lbs from this single tree alone!
This was a school-days' worth of a picking trip. We started around 9 and ended at 3:35 on the dot, which is a LOT of time especially on a Sunday, so shoutout to my volunteers that stuck it out!
As always, all the love,
Carrie