A red-headed teen-ager in the orchard. What could go wrong?

Yesterday's work-tickets

The great news is that my volunteer-help yesterday was able to fix the lawn tractor that was in the pole barn at the Upper and Hill Orchards.

I asked him what he did to fix it and he shrugged his shoulders. He had done a handful of things and wasn't sure which one(s) had resolved the issue. He did caution me that there were likely to be mice nests in the shroud that directed cooling air from the fan and I needed to clean those out or I could warp the cylinders if I ran it for extended periods.

We spent the next two hours moving wood from piles in the orchard to the property line where the neighbor would claim it for firewood.

Near the end of the two hours, the generous neighbor lady (not the wood burner) who has been letting me use her hose brought over her niece and asked for a tour of the orchard.

I can be awkward around people until I "calibrate". It takes me longer to calibrate around women then around men. It takes me longer to calibrate around teenagers than around adults or children. It takes me longer to calibrate around red-heads than around brunettes.

Yes, her niece was a gangly, red-headed teen-ager. She looked like a colt whose body parts were at different stages of a violent growth-spurt. For all that, she comported herself with poise and grace. Gymnastics is a wonderful activity, I am thinking. 

Her parents had tried to grow fruit trees but their site was too shady, had too many squirrels and too much deer pressure. It was a bust.

The home-run was when I learned she was from Illinois "Born and bred...", I took her to an Illinois Everbearing Mulberry. She was impressed. She ate a handful and picked a handful for her aunt who had elected to drop out of the tour early.

From the comments

Anon @ 8:51 PM yesterday asked "Would you mind posting some of the sources for your knowledge?" 

The most concise answer I can give is that I used to be a member of an email list called NAFEX-L. NAFEX stands for North American Fruit EXplorers.

Very early in the days of the internet, it was a "thing" for people interested in arcane topics to join email lists where people discussed various problems and opportunities. At one time I was a member of SHEEP-L, GRAZE-L and NAFEX-L.

The members of NAFEX-L included giants in the field like Ed Fackler (Southern Indiana), Lon Rombaugh (Western Oregon), Lucky Pittman (Western Kentucky), Bob Purvis (Alaska, Minnesota, Idaho), Bernie Nikolia (Alberta) and hosts of others from Maine to Florida to Alaska to California.

NAFEX still exists and publishes four magazines (called Pomona) a year. It is organized around interest groups. Each interest group has a leader and members are encouraged to join various interest groups.

The common denominator in these groups are that most of the members are interested in growing fruit in areas that are not currently centers of commercial production. They are home fruit growers and holders of small orchards. They are people who push the boundaries.

Back to LIST format

I think the LIST format was one of the high-points of the internet. Most of the questions were well posed and the answers were well thought out and presented. The format encouraged dialogue. Threads were durable and could be referenced later on. The readership was large enough to have a wide range of expertise but small enough that trolls were rare. The topics tended to be quite focused. Most of the contributors were genuinely motivated by a desire to help their fellow man.

By contrast, today's social media is "open" to the general public. Any idiot can comment. Trolls abound. Forums get flooded with random, tangential off-topic threads. In many cases, contributors are instant-experts and mindlessly parrot the summary from the first line of a Google search as deep-truth.