Pom Picking

As most of you know, my mom loves to garden. She use to make us help her weed, and in Vegas, sometimes it was fun, but due to my deep hatred for bugs, I generally HATE gardening. I don't care if it's a small avid, a pumpkin bug or a HUGE Tomato worm, I hate bugs! The only place they should be is at the ugly bug ball!

I was at Kiki's house yesterday, hanging out, taking tests and helping editing when I saw a random man with a box heading towards the orchard. I asked Kiki who he was and what he was doing and she said that it's pom picking season so people are coming over all the time to pick some. Before I went home, She, Kylan and I went into the orchard and picked 3 boxes full. I wasn't too sure about getting under trees and climbing around in them cause in Missouri, there is generally all kinds of bugs in the trees, not to mention all types of spiders and ticks and other creepy crawlies that give me the hee-bee gee-bees. Surprisingly, it was not bad at all. Kiki found one that had bugs in it, but that was because it was 1/2 eaten by birds and bugs found their way in. I found some that had tiny spider webs in the flower part, but overall, it was bug free. The only thing on them that grossed me out was the bird poop, and that's easy to grab around.

As we were back in the orchard, Matt picked the ones off the hybrid tree outside their front door. Those ones look amazing because they are HUGE light pink pom's. I went home last night with a large box filled with pomegranates ready to be picked apart and made into something wonderful!
At volleyball last night, I told Gretchen about how I had picked pomegranates at the house and felt very cultural (by picking fruit off a tree - lol). She said she wanted to pick some, so I cleared it with Kiki to go over today. Gretchen picked me up at about 9 and we headed over. We had cleared quite a trees last night, and looking at the orchard, there wasn't much red left on the green trees. It almost seemed as if the only red left were the pom's that the birds have been eating. HOWEVER, we went to the trees on the West side of the orchard and we found PLENTY!

Izzy and Kaya were so excited to pick their own. These little girls are tough! Kaya was a little hesitant to go where Gretchen and I told her to go cause she was small enough to fit and we weren't, but for the most part, they would get right in the branches and be picking away. I didn't pick nearly as many cause I didn't want to pick one that had bugs crawling on it, or a spider on the leaves or spiderwebs around it. You could say I was quite envious of their attitudes of picking.

After a while, Izzy was ok with playing "dumper", as in we hand them to her and she dumps them in the box. I tried to hand Kaya some to dump in the box, but every time I asked her she said, "But Jessica, I'm picking my own!" It was so cute how they loved doing it. Gretchen was cracking me up because 1. she made a similar "cultural" comment like I had the night before, and 2. I told her the boxes were full and she still wanted to keep picking. "Seriously Gretchen, the boxes are overflowing." ha ha ha