A Little Bit Of Paradise
When we first moved to Florida 15 years ago, we thought we had our own little bit of paradise; we were amazed by the lush beauty of all the tropical trees and just the meer fact that everyone seemed to take life at a slower pace. I was stunned that we had 13 orange trees in our yard alone...wow! It was like inheriting a mini orchard . No problem, I thought, we had three energetic little kids that would love to pick and eat the oranges. It would save on the grocery bills. Last but not least, people would tell us how we could profit from the sale of oranges from our trees and that people would even be willing to pick them and pay us. Oh, how naive we were. hee hee
We set out and bought an electric juicer and set up a family production line from picking them, washing them, slicing them and squeezing the pulp out of them...resulting in the most delicious fresh squeezed Valenzia orange juice you could imagine, yet we quickly realized that our trees were producing more than our little family could handle, and learned sooner, than later, that not only were we NOT going to make a small fortune with our trees, but we couldn't even get our church or any other church groups, or clubs interested in coming out and picking them for free.
Another delimma or mystery concerning the orange trees was that frequently, we would find whole orange peels on the sidewalk or in the grass and it would look like one of the kids had hollowed out all of the juicy inside and left the peels all over the place, well, I was going to let them know that Mommy did not think this was funny and they should not leave their peels around and you know, all three of them denied ever leaving the peels in the yard... Well, to my surprise, one day, while bringing in the grocerys from the car something dropped with a thud from the tree right above me...yes, it was an orange peel, and to my amazement, I soon learned that the floridan squirrels, and birds have a taste for the tropical fruit, as well, mystery solved.
Over the years our wonderful parents, my in-laws, Floyd and Beverly, would come over without fail usually once or twice a week and pick an abundance to share with their neighbors and friends. We were so grateful for their help, as it was a bit overwhelming the volume of oranges 13 trees can produce. We too, would do our best to share the fruit with all of our friends and neighbors.
Now, the trees have served us well, and it has been necessary to cut them down, so in order to save $90 a tree, we have decided to cut them down our selves, thus leaving the biggest delimma of how to get the recycling truck to pick the branches up, as there is a limit on how much you can put out to the curb. Wouldn't you know it, but the first night the truck left without picking up any of the branches and leaving us a note that we had left "over the limit", oh yes, here is the good part, my night in shining armor, my hubby, see's how upset I am and jumps in the car, note in hand and flags them down saying we would help load if they came back...and THEY DID! This turn of events, however, definantly ruffled a few feathers with the neighbors, as they were sure we had slipped them a twenty or something. We assured the neighbors we hadn't, in fact, we were planning on writing a thank you note, just as we had done in the past. So, just the two of us, once again, with the squirrels and our fine feathered friends looking on accomplished cutting down yet another tree, leaving only five to go. :)
posted by Pamela @ 10:26 PM
1 Comments:
My my my, the days of orange picking! We could never get rid of those things! Thank goodness grandma and grandpa came to help us out! I can't believe they are almost all gone. Oh, remind me later to show you how to post a pic to a blog without posting a new blog. :)
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