These past two weekends have been quite "fruitful" for us, you might say. Apparently, we have a thing for picking fruit. Or if we're not picking it, we're stomping on it. I went back through some of my picture archives and found that over the years we have done lots and lots of picking of these:
Now we can add picking these to our ever growing list of things we like to pick off bushes/trees:
Minnesota seems to have an apple farm within a 5 mile radius of anywhere you go. So, we thought it would be fun to pick apples off the trees instead of off the shelf of the grocery store. But...maybe we picked the wrong apple orchard, or the wrong time of day, or the wrong part of the season because when we got there, we found more apples (and gardener snakes) on the ground than on the trees.
This is how we had to pick apples:
We had to send the brave ones up into the trees and climb as high as they could to get the ones on the very tippy top of the over-grown trees. But even then, most of those apples were pock-marked with holes from birds or who knows what else.
My dreams of walking through the orchard with a bushel basket of apples idealistically swinging from my arm was quickly fading. Instead were the shrieks of "ew", "gross", "can we go now". We could only find 5 acceptable apples to put in our beautiful basket. So, we promptly walked back to the barn and picked up a pre-filled, ice cold bag of pre-picked apples for double what we would have paid at the grocery store. $15 and 15 minutes later, dashed were our dreams of adding a new fruit to our ever expanding list of things we like to pick.
But have no fear, we found another fruit. Instead of picking this fruit, we got to stomp on it! Bonus. We went to the annual St. Croix Vineyards Grape Stomp in Stillwater. I had visions of this in my head:
Let's just say, that's not how they do it any more. I would have loved it if I could have worn that get-up while stomping grapes in a teeny barrel. But what no one tells you is that there are bees swarming all around and inside the barrel is full of wet, mushy, sticky, gooey, stainy grapes. This was our experience in pictures:
Chuck was actually part of a contest with other adults to see who could stomp the 'best'. He won a corkscrew for his efforts.
Chloe was in the barrel long enough to take the picture and promptly jumped back out. This was not her cup of tea.
Bennett is having a little too much fun. He's already splashed grape juice up the front and down the back of his shirt. He's an 'aggressive stomper'. I am having issues with the texture (and trying to stay free of grape juice stain). Gavin's sensory issues and fear of bees would not even permit him to come anywhere close to those barrels of death. He preferred sitting in the 70 degree weather and bemoaning how dreadfully 'hot' it was.
But we did walk away with a picturesque shot (that Chuck took) of the stain that the grapes made on the floor. Overall, it was a once in a lifetime experience. Next time I'd rather pick the grapes instead of stomp on them.
