March 10 - First Real Work Day

This hard winter has really been a mixed blessing for us, we have really hit school hard, but let me tell you, we were ready to get out and about on a nice day! Today we all headed down to the orchard and worked on the south pump and multiple other projects that have needed attention (like Conrad proofing his pen :).

Daddy had hired a skid steer to do some digging today, almost all of us got to learn how to drive it.

 This is what our river screen looks like out of water. We will probably put it in the river in a month or so.

 Azure spoiled us this year, and now we have a new forklift, since both of our old ones went down last spring. We are so pleased to have it!!

 Gabe's new purchase is a Go-Cart from his cousin, Royal. It needs a little work, but he learned a bunch getting it fixed, and it will be such an amazing tool this summer for him.

August 2 - Digging out the South Pump

As the summer has worn on, the river has gone down a bunch. Dad rented a track hoe to dig trenches for some of the pipes we are putting in for the new irrigation system, so we took this afternoon to dig a hole under the South Pump. This involves driving in the river and digging under the floating screen that we use to suck water out of the river into the irrigation system. In the winter, this beach is totally underwater, but right now it is about 6" deep. It was a good excuse to play in the river.

-Peach Harvest

Summer in the orchard doesn't leave much time for huge events, but we sure do love the small ones. We are so busy during the summer with harvest. By June we literally have peaches running out of our ears. The trees produced so many peaces and nectarines this year. We were shipping fruit up about every 3 days. Our fork lift broke down permanently somewhere during the peach harvest, so the guys built a dock to load the fruit in the semi using the tractor, or we would hand load it in using the baskets that we use to pick the fruit into. 

Gabe and Shea loading the fruit baskets onto the trailer to take off the field.

As the picking crew finishes up their baskets they stack them in the shade to help preserve them. The days are hot and the rule of thumb is for every hour the fruit is off the tree and in the sun we lose an day of shelf life. So we are running like crazy to get the fruit in the cooler as fast as possible.

Peach harvest is a bunch of physical work, and a blast! Most of the harvest it takes a couple people to bring in fruit, and working with my siblings in the orchard is the funnest thing about the job.

July 29 - Wild Choke Cherries and Basket wash Factory

One of our favorite kinds of syrup is made from wild choke cherries. When we lived in Texas, we couldn't find any, as they like to be near water. We were thrilled to find that they grew all up and down the John Day river. Early this morning Momma, Gabriel, and I all headed out to pick. We found one tree and from that tree picked more than enough for what we needed this year.

Couldn't resist taking this picture of Conrad, he looks as excited about the berries as we were.

Chicken brooding is in full swing as well. This particular hen hatched out a clutch of 14 chicks early spring, this is her second clutch. 

 Meanwhile back at the office the boys had a washing system going for all the picking baskets in the orchard, getting ready for the major harvest. By the end of the day they had it down really good...and were soaking wet!

Summer is such a beautiful part of the year here. We absolutely love working all together as a family!

June 27 - Lots of Help

Some very good friends came out to get some cherries today, they have 7 kids, and immediately 6 of them wanted to help me on the tractor. We had a blast, and I don't believe I have ever loaded the semi so fast! I had all I could do to keep caught up and take pictures at the same time.

June Cherry Harvest

One of Janessa's many job descriptions for the orchard is photographer. She takes all manner of pictures of the fruit on the tree, harvesting, fruit in the trailer getting ready to ship and some pictures of our life and certain projects that are going on. She has an amazing eye for a good picture. I have gathered a few from cherry harvest for your pleasure. Please enjoy!

The cherries have to get cool as soon as possible, so we lay them across the floor of the semi 6 or 7 in a row, by the next morning they are down to 32 degrees. Let me tell you a freezing cold cherry on a hot day is one of the best treats you can have!

The fun, challenging part of the harvest is keeping count of each one of these totes, it took me a week or so before my count was right every single day :D

After the cherries are cool, we stack them into these bins. Each bin can hold 30 totes of cherries.

My all time favorite cherries are the Rainier, I ate way too many. There was about 3 times more Rainier cherries than any other variety.

This plant is one of our worst enemies in the orchard, Poison Ivy/oak (depending on who you talk to).

During cherry harvest, there are literally millions of wild daisies blooming all over the orchard!

Dad getting ready to prime the pump.

Garrett and his big puppy, they sure do love each other!

Here are some of the earliest apples.

A mixed load of cherries.

Garrett, Gabe, and I spent the morning cleaning up the mess we made on the day before, then moved on to making another one.

Garrett is doing his "weight lifting", he has 40lbs in each hand, it's surprising how fast this trick becomes the easiest method of carrying the totes.

Our fork lift died the first week of cherry harvest, so we had to do a little bit of double stacking by hand.