Picking Day 4: Heat Wave

All I can really say about the last few days is hot hot hot.  Although the nights are cool September nights, the days have been stuck in August or maybe even July with ninety plus days all week.  Yesterday I picked out at the Lansing orchard for the first time having spent my first two days at the Ithaca orchard.  Both are owned by Cornell and used for research.  The Lansing orchard along with apples also has grapes, pears and pawpaws.  It sits on the eastern bluff of one of the finger lakes providing a stunning view of Cayuga Lake - a tempting proposition when one is standing at the top of a ladder in the hot sun at three in the afternoon.

 It has been the week of Galas, first color picking and then stripping.  The stripping largely consisted of pulling small green marble size apples off the tress.  There is no finesse involved in this kind of picking, as the tree seems almost as determined to hang on to these small spheres of joy as you are to pull them off, ideally getting them into your picking bucket.  Paired with the hot temperatures, this kind of picking quickly leads to frustration and low morale on the crew, which in turn compounds the situation by making the task take even longer than it otherwise would.  Today should be the last day of extream heat and also of the Galas, if all goes well.  Next week still has highs in the seventies and eighties, but somehow I think it may feel just a little more like fall. 

Rows of trees with the Cornell Orchard shed behind