U-Pick

On Memorial Day we decided to spend our day off gettin closer to the land! We took the truck (ahh manly! we could stack all our boxes of produce in the bed ;) and drove to Brentwood. Walnut Ave is the Las Vegas Strip of "u-pick" fruit. The place was filled with handpainted signs, orchards, and cars everywhere. We went first to pick some peaches, but the cold weather in the preceding weeks had delayed the ripening and the peaches were hard and a bit tart. We did find some apricot trees in the peach orchard though, and they were tasty. That is John and Christy posing with an apricot tree.

Then we jumped back onto Walnut Ave (no walnut orchards though) and followed directions from one of the peach people to a less popular cherry orchard. So we didn't have to share a tree... It was kind of like Disneyland. But we picked a bag full of cherries, and of course made it into a competition. Cherry trees are actually really cool because they start branching out really close to the ground. In order to find big bunches of cherries (they hide really well) I found it useful to slither between some branches so that I was basically inside the tree. Then I would turn around so that I faced out, away from the center of the tree. Then it's often a matter of stretching high enough for my 5'9" frame to reach the hitherto unmolested fruit.



The attendants said the cherries were called "coral" or something to that effect. I can't find information on any cherry with a name that sounds like that. But here's a picture. The cherries are certainly ripe enough to eat when they're still reddish-purple, but the near utter blackness signals complete juicy-ness.

By the way, our first pick-up for the CSA is Tuesday.