These first days of January, 2022 have sneaked up on us. The past year, 2021, is in the history books and in some ways, a very good thing. Small business owners have had to deal with challenges unlike any in the past decade. Although, our fruit business was seasonal, our challenges were similar to and in many ways compounded by factors we could not control because we are small. Overall, though, we were fortunate that we could rely on good friends and family to help us and good customers to buy our product.
What a difference a year makes! We ended our season in a positive way. Our harvest, although intense and exhausting, was bountiful and we were able to set up at numerous Farmers’ Markets, tractor and/or trade shows. It was really uplifting for us to see our customers, old and new, and get reacquainted with them. The U-PIK location was well received and we are making plans to make it an even better experience for our visitors in 2022.
We haven’t been too conscientious about maintaining this website with updates. “Begin Again in 22” is our new motto as we start this year. Our goal is to reach out to all with more frequent updates on this website and also keep our Facebook account more up to date as well. Not being too “tech savvy” is a real drawback in this world of social media, but we promise to make efforts to do our best.
Well, it’s January and that can mean only one thing. Yes, get out the pruning equipment and let’s go! Weather in our region has been good and that makes a difficult job more easy with which to deal. We’re moving right along with trimming the apple trees. We still hand prune each tree. The grandchildren call the process, “giving the trees a haircut.” That’s about what we do to each tree in our orchard. Not all orchardists prune in this manner but that’s what we do. It is an arduous job but we’ve been doing it for over fifty (50) years and probably won’t change the process at this point. Prior posts describe what we do and why we do it and referring to those posts will pique your interest. Pruning is probably one of THE most important jobs to perform in the orchard so onward we go for another year.