We left the Wenatchee Stake Center at 5:00 and headed home. In the first 30-40 minutes, we passed at least 10 huge semi trucks hauling bins filled with freshly-picked apples! The harvest is begun. I grew up on a farm in central California surrounded by orchards. This is my kind of country. Of course I asked Pres Lewis to pull over a few times so I could walk into the orchards and smell the fragrance there. It took me back to a happy place in my memory.
Here are a few pictures of the beauty of an apple orchard just before harvest:
The pins are in the rows, waiting for morning.
OK, I wasn’t expecting this. There are SPIDERS EVERYWHERE!!. I don’t mind them, but I wasn’t expecting to see the huge webs all over Every tree! Wow. They were beautiful.
Seeing so many spiders gave me a new appreciation for the pickers. 
Take a look at all the bins. There are millions of bins in Washington waiting to be filled. Millions. These were very small stacks compared to most. 
I can’t get over HOW MANY APPLES fill these trees. It doesn’t look like they’ve been thinned at all. They are all huge and beautiful. I don’t know how the trees support them. There are no props in the fields. Many of the orchards have wire trellising. I’m not sure what they call it here. It helps support the weight of the branches and it trains the trees to be thin, low to the ground and easy to pick. It also allows maximum sunlight to grace the apples.
Tomorrow these bins will fill and the apples will be taken to the huge cold storages and packing sheds all around us. These apples are stored, then packed year-round. We hope all of you out there in the world enjoy our Washington apples!
Our Washington Yakima Mission 