When Mother Nature Smiles

It was a busy day today and my body aches for it. The photo above shows what fruit will be going to the Post Falls Food Bank this week. The top two boxes are our apples that Jay picked today. They might be Mackintosh. Hardly a worm hole, he said. The lower box on the left is full of Greengage plums that I gleaned from our neighbor Davy's orchard. There was a mighty wind last night, so mostly I picked them up off the ground. The ones still on the trees still appear unripe. Maybe in a few days.  They are very small  - no bigger than a large grape, but  very sweet plum when ripe. The box to the right are Davy's Italian prunes. He is generous to let me pick for the food bank.

This is just a sampling of the three large boxes of Bartlett pears I picked last week from our old tree before they got very ripe. I gave many to the neighbors. They keep pretty well in the refrigerator.

Then after I'd rested up from picking at Davy's, I picked these wild golden plumes from a clump of trees in a secret place. They are very difficult to get at even with a ladder and a picker because the trees are very tall and, of course, the plums mostly grow near the top. If I shake them down, they inevitably fall in brambles and wild rose bushes.

 And this is a variety of red plum that the deer planted years ago by Anna Spring.

Last year there were no wild pink plums on the large tree down by that spring, but this year it was loaded. I've frozen bags and bags of them. The deer come to stand under that tree just waiting for them to fall and that was where our trail camera photographed the black bear a few weeks back at 11 p.m.

It's already a bountiful season and most of the apples haven't even ripened yet.