Because there’s MORE TO DO outside.
I’m writing and speaking as usual, but as summer gets underway, things that have to be done on the farm multiply. Most recently, peaches had to be thinned–they grow like THIS before thinning.
More than half of those need to come off so that the others have room to ripen.
Here are my three helpers, from top to bottom in descending order of actual usefulness (that’s not counting my father, the Head Honcho, who’s supervising from that chair behind Emily):
And here’s Helper 1 ascending into the tree.
Man, that was a nasty job. It was hot. And peach leaves make me itch. And I kept finding ticks crawling on me. And after we thinned we had to rake up all the fallen peaches (they spread disease if you leave them there to rot) and dump them in the woods.
Yeah, the peaches will be worth it, eventually. It’s just a very delayed gratification.
“Why I post less in the summer…Because there’s MORE TO DO outside.”
Oh, my family and I can definitely relate to that. I think that sometimes city dwelling people don’t realize that living in the country does not equal being retired on a resort, even when you’re doing the slightest bit of farming.
Farmlife (oh, a new word – like wildlife) doesn’t take a summer vacation.
~Amanda~
Isn’t delayed gratification always the best, though?
That kind of work is generally quite satisfying, more satisfying than intellectual work, however rigorous, can be.
I don’t do much farmlifing (thanks for the new word, Amanda!) anymore, but I did quite a bit many years ago: breaking beans, shelling peas, and shucking corn on the front porch. Oh, and picking blackberries. There were no thornless varieties then. Thank heavens I didn’t have to help with the actual “putting up,” (i.e., canning and freezing); but if we wanted to eat well, we worked in the summer. Delayed gratification, indeed.
But we need a picture of what the peaches looked like after the thinning.