Yesterday morning I pried myself out of bed at the early hour of 3:45am.  Jared, who’s used to getting up this early for work, didn’t have too much of an issue.  We were on the road by 4:00am.  (My parents came and stayed with the girls and got Cedi to school).  We were heading to Michigan and back to pick up the apple trees we are planting in the orchard this year. We made great time and were at Hilltop Fruit Trees by 10:00 (Michigan time…so 9:00 our time).  We had 275 trees to load onto the truck and take home.  Here they are all loaded.  The key to driving with them is to keep there roots covered so the wind didn’t completely dry them out.  Jared strapped and strapped and strapped them down. 

We were back on the road and home before 3:00pm.  A success.Here’s a picture of a gnarly looking tree at the Hilltop orchard.  Jared and I are thinking these are some that the company uses for grafting to make other trees.  Either that or they have a completely different method of pruning than we do.  Any way you look at it – the orchard full of theses shaped trees is super creepy but super cool looking. 

I had to snap this picture before we left too.  They had HUGE stacks of pallets at their place and I loved these brightly painted ones.

We think we have at least one place in the orchard that is actually dry enough for us to plant in so we’ll get about 70 in later today – fingers crossed…