Blossoms Everywhere!

They have begun to show up all around us and I cannot begin to express my excitement!!!! I have been checking daily for the last week to watch the small buds begin their process. This weekend, we drove out to some nearby orchards so that I could check their progress and so that I could share where I spend so much of my time these days. I love the orchards and spend much of my free time driving the roads near us just to see the changes. To see the work that goes into bringing this fruit to our table is beautiful as well as humbling! To watch the trimming, the harvesting, the watering of roots on the mornings when we were below freezing! I love each moment and each new task I see. I love the sounds of the fans on those cold winter mornings when at 4AM, you wake to hear that familiar sound of the fans spreading the warmth from the heaters out across the citrus trees to save the fruit for just a few more weeks! The bees! I have dreamed for years of being a bee keeper and it is beautiful to see these hives lined along side the orchards, filled with bees working so hard. This is a sight I have always loved and now can sit by the road and watch daily. To listen to everybody talk about the timing... the timing of the rain, the timing of the bees, the timing of the cold. Having grown up on a farm, these conversations sound so familiar but with a new twist. To be living in the middle of an area where so much food is produced should not be so different from where I was raised, yet it is all so foreign from what I knew. To buy my produce from the orchard having watched these trees as they were cared for is much different than anything I have experienced outside of our family gardens. There was so much machinery used in the planting and harvesting of the crops I grew up watching. I remember listening in July for the corn to grow so fast thay you could hear it. I worked the bean fields and helped harvest the corn yet it was all so different than what these foods experience as the workers come in to work them. I now wonder how many hands touched this orange before I stopped by the orchard and brought it home to my family. The workers are filling the strawberry fields as well and it is a beautiful sight to see these berries sunning themselves on the side of the road in flats waiting to be bought. This is what my daughter has been waiting for all winter and is so excited to know that the week of her birthday is now the week we will go for our first time to the fields to buy our strawberries! What a blessing. I wish for you all many blessings as well and hope this finds you enjoying the days you are experiencing wherever you may be at this time in your life.