Back on track!

Not only the manual labor is tiring. Intellectual work can prove fairly tiring too, like any other job. Believe me, I'm a journalist. Hence, I've given myself some spontaneous, unscheduled holiday for a month and now I'm back on track, on the Yotvata life and the Dates Team - it's Day 55 for the Date Farmer. This time for rest came in perfect timing with the season prior to the harvest of the dates, which means short days, a lot of day-off's and generally not much to do, but wait for the real deal - start shaking the trees! That came to be somehow my time to get some rest too after a winter of hard work, in the kibbutz and in writing, before getting heads-on into the frenzy of the harvest season.

So, here we are now. In the middle of the Arava, next to the Jordanian border, and we're fired up big time, mainly during the night, getting those fruits off the trees, in hundreds of crates every night. Two months ago they were yellow, smaller, hard and unripe. Now they're golden brown, soft, moist and delicious. We started last Sunday and it's expected to keep going until late October or even early November. In the first place it's the Medjool variety (the biggest part of Yotvata's trees) and we're using the Afron machine, to shake them off the tree. Later on we'll move to the Degel Noor variety, and also manual harvest in different spots of the fields, cutting off those bunches that we've bagged recently, and others of short trees that cannot be shaken by the Afron.

Here's one of the first fruits of the season, from the west fields...