Today in the orchard
(Report by Skylar.) Alyssa Gavlik was on the farm today. Our first task was to harvest all the apples on the Trailman in the BRC. We gathered up our equipment: apple crates and picking buckets, a five gallon bucket for the discards, and each of us our own apple ladder. We were ready. Our ladders are fantastic, but we soon needed more height, so Alyssa retrieved a taller ladder and a pole picker. Maybe next year we’ll build longer ladders. After the Trailman was the Black Ice and Purple Heart plums. We traded apple crates for shallow, plastic crates and our ladders for a tripod ladder.
In the afternoon it was time to stack firewood. We started in on the huge pile of wood that had been dumped in a heap by a neighbor in trade for our work in his orchard. It seemed as if only a moment had passed when I looked at our stack and it was four feet tall. It’s quite beautiful, but next time we’re going to step it up and meticulously create a design in the mosaic of cut wood.