by Ronnie Reese

Created on: October 01, 2009   Last Updated: October 03, 2009

Raymond in the Garden

Mr. Brown was showing his son Raymond how to pick apricots on their new farm near Parachute, Colorado. He picked the apricots and placed them down inside the 'picking sack' as he carefully selected the best fruit from his orchards to be sold in Denver.

"Okay, I've got enough in here. Now, I go over here to the bushel basket and set my bag down inside of it. Okay?" he questioned

"I'm with you so far, Dad," assured Raymond.

"Then, I just lift on these two little pieces of rope, and see what happens?" Mr. Brown questioned once again.

Raymond noticed that when his father lifted the two little pieces of rope that the load of fruit he'd just picked, emptied into the basket over which Mr. Brown was resting his picking sack.

"Wow, can I try that?" Raymond asked enthusiastically.

"I thought you'd never ask," smiled Raymond's father.

Raymond's dad reached behind the seat of their truck and pulled out a picking sack for Raymond. And in no time Raymond got quite proficient at picking apricots and emptying his picking sack into a bushel basket. A couple hours after they began, however Raymond's stomach started feeling like breakfast had been a couple days ago.

"When can we go eat, Dad?" he asked. I'm hungry."

"We're almost done here Ray. Let's try to finish this section of the orchard," urged Ray's dad. "If you'd like, you can eat a couple apricots. That will help fill you up until we get back to the house for lunch.

"Umm...these are delicious," slurped Raymond as he smacked his lips.

"Now Raymond, anytime you're out here and you want an apricot, you just go ahead and eat it," smiled Mr. Brown.

"How many apricot trees do we have, Dad?"

"We've got about a hundred trees, Son."

"And, what other kinds of fruit are we going to have?"

"Well, we've got about a dozen plum trees. And there's three different varieties of those. Those will be the next fruit to turn ripe. And then we've got about twenty peach trees that will produce their fruit after that. Then you might find a few grapes on those vines down by the cherry trees alongside the hen house. And after that, there's about twenty apple trees down in the bottom orchard. And after that it will be winter and there will be three feet of snow out in these orchards.

"So Dad, when do we pick the cherries?" questioned Raymond.

"Sorry, son. But the cherry harvest froze out this year," replied Raymond's dad.

"Well, are those the only cherry trees that we have?" asked Raymond.

"No, Son. We have a couple trees up

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