Avocado Madness

So, yeah, we went to Russia for about two weeks (plus a few days of travel time). You can see photos from that trip here and especially photos of the Moscow Metro here.

Then we came home to bizarre midsummer pouring rain, and now it's a heat wave. Because the weather this year is already weird so let's just go all out. It might have been a bit more impressive if we were not already totally messed up by jet lag and the colds that inevitably hit us in Moscow. As it was we basically slept for two days after we got home.

This evening we got together with our neighbor, Richard, to harvest avocados from his massive, 40-foot-tall avocado tree. We have the ladder, he has an extending fruit picker.

He climbed up into the tree, then used the fruit picker to grab avocados that were hanging over the neighboring yard. The primary reason for harvesting the avocados all at once is that there are two small kids who live next door, and a couple other kids who play or hang out under the tree. Falling avocados from 40 feet up can do some serious damage.

Richard tossed the picked avocados down, first to his son, then to his wife, then to Noel. A baseball mitt is a vital piece of equipment for harvesting avocados from very tall trees. Even so, several avocados fell from the tree and broke into pieces on the concrete driveway.

And that's the haul: three sacks of avocados. We still have half the tree to harvest, because the rope to extend the ladder broke and we decided to call it quits for the night. Our take was one sack, which is probably enough avocados to make us royally sick in addition to freezing some for later. The neighbors will be donating the excess to the food bank.

posted by ayse on 07/03/11