Pomegranate Picking

My dear friend Sandy and me after picking for three hours. I know I look HOT!

Okay, I just might not make it through the night. We started a family tradition many years ago of making pomegranate jelly to give to family and friends for Christmas. It makes a beautiful red color jelly and it is quite tasty. The only thing wrong is that it is a he#* of a lot of work to get the juice to make it. Mindi, Julie Greer and I spent all morning picking the fruit in our neighborhood. Then this afternoon we went to one of my best friends Sandy Nichols' house down in Lehi and picked her two trees. I am so tired and sore I think I could crawl into bed and not wake up. We lived for twelve years down in the orange groves in North Mesa which we called Lehi. There are a lot of good memories of raising our family there. Rich came down for the last 45 minutes to help pick the really high ones and haul all the fruit home. Up until a few years ago my parents were still picking from trees in Mesa. They are both 80 this year and I can not believe that they could still pick these pesky little fruit. Tomorrow will be another day of picking and then the real fun starts when we start juicing the fruit. As we drove home I was thinking how doing pomegranates is like having another baby, you forget how much work it is until you start doing it again. It isn't all bad, there is a sense of accomplishment knowing that we are harvesting fruit that usually just falls off and rots. Being out in the fresh air and doing something you hope will make others happy is satisfying. Someone suggested that we sell our jelly. I don't think anyone would be willing to pay the price it would cost for how much work is involved. It truly is a labor of love, just like my baby blankets.

Rich getting all of the one's that we could not reach.

Mindi and the kids. They were so much help.