how thinning fruit is like selling stuff

Here's an analogy between what I used to do and what I spend my days doing now. In sales, you cultivate relationships with accounts in hopes of closing deals and harvesting some commission loot. Your book of accounts may be small or large and it is up to the salesperson to decide how they will prioritize the attention they receive. Success or failure is usually a result of which accounts are carefully tended into fruition and which receive less attention if their harvest may be more difficult or less rewarding. Salespeople who go after the "low hanging fruit" are usually the most successful in my experience. You aren't supposed to tell management how you prioritize your account management by your desire to get paid, but it's not exactly a secret either. But if I had ever told my boss that in order to reach my sales goal, I would need to cut off contact with 90% of my accounts; not too sure that would have gone over well.

apple cluster
Now as to how this analogy relates to farming, my first time thinning fruit in our peach & apple orchard. I did the usual research before I got started; consulting the web, my master gardener manual and a couple books. I was stunned to discover I would need to remove 90% of the fruit off over 50 trees by hand. To put this in some perspective, an average peach or apple tree might have a cluster of 3 or 4 fruit buds every 4 inches or so along the branches. That needs to be thinned down to one single developing peach or apple every 8 inches. This is crucial because the weight of so much fruit will literally break branches off the tree and if all the fruit is left on the tree, the end result will be tiny undeveloped peaches and apples without the desired taste and sweetness.

peaches that will never meet our taste buds
When I had taken a field trip out to a local commercial orchard of over 5000 trees, I learned that the pros can thin a tree in about half an hour. With only 50 trees that should be a piece of cake right, maybe 25 hours of work, no big deal. Well that commercial orchard was comprised entirely of dwarf trees where you could reach the top of every tree on your tip toes, many of our trees are up to 20ft tall and would involve some type of monkey business in order to access the fruit that was not "low hanging." The first apple tree took me over 2 hours and I was beginning to envision branches overloaded with delicious fruit shearing off under their heavy load and laying in the orchard for only bugs to enjoy. I was extremely fortunate that our 25 or so cherry trees, many of which are way taller than 25ft, would not need to be thinned. Probably the toughest thing about thinning the fruit is deciding who gets to stay on the branch and who gets plucked off and tossed on the ground. Some choices are easy, the smallest fruits go, anything with worm holes goes, anything misshapen or likely to be damaged as it grows is gone. But what do you do when confronted with a cluster of 4 perfectly beautiful half dollar sized peaches?

fuzzy half dollar sized peaches
Yes, it is easy to become indecisive when holding the fate of fruit between your pruners. Sometimes you just have to clip em all and let God sort em out; to paraphrase a t-shirt my dad would never let me buy at the gun shows we went to. Working underneath a warm spring sun when the sky is clear Carolina blue is not a bad deal, especially with a German Shepherd and Blue Heeler to keep you company

the boys, der kaiser and hopalong
It does give you a lot of time to think though, as operating a set of pruners is not exactly rocket science. I've thought about everything from the guest list at my 9th birthday party to the cafeteria lunch menu in first grade to wondering what I would have thought about thinning fruit for 9 hours a day last year while sitting comfortably in my cubicle. Tomorrow, I'm headed over to a couple's land who I met searching for free horse manure. When I first pulled up their driveway they were doing something that looked like a cross between a renaissance fair and live action dungeons and dragons. Turns out they like to do medieval re-enacting, which I managed to sound very interested in while I shoveled up their precious horse dung into my pickup truck. They were interested in becoming more self-sufficient and had moved here to start a homestead just like April and I did. As we talked they brought up the idea of trading work days at each others places and that sounded like a pretty cool idea to me. When I heard that they had acquired 3 free goats this week and needed to expand to clear some land and expand their fenced pasture land, I knew it was time to ante up and put my muscles where my mouth was. So, I'll head over tomorrow morning to spend a day clearing some overgrown brush and pounding in fence posts. I like the idea of being neighborly but I don't really like any of my neighbors, so I try and do a little good with whoever I cross paths with. Their kid also looks a lot like I did in 4th grade; when I was chubby and thought glow in the dark high-top Keds were cool.

And as I finish this post about how thinning fruit is like selling stuff, tasting the results of our first attempt at homebrewing, I realize that they aren't really alike at all. Because now I really enjoy what I am doing, even if I am working for free.

rock stacking, not just for hippies...