Gehlke Family News & Views

It is, also, the weekend when 42.3 million Americans will take to highways and airways to “get away” for the unofficial start to summer. This is not a number we made up, but one that comes from the American Automobile Association. That represents about one-eighth of the entire U.S. population traveling somewhere, which makes us happy to be among the majority who aren’t, especially when we have our own travel experience scheduled in a few months.

Finding things to do close to home is rarely a challenge, considering the Bay Area is a hotbed of activities no matter the time of year. One of the closest to us can be found in Brentwood, with its thousands of acres of orchards and U-pick farms; May is always the kickoff of tree fruit harvest season, and it all begins with cherries.

It had been a few years since we last went fruit picking. One of those things you take for granted when you live in a place that surrounds you with its charms on a daily basis. But we had so much rain this winter that, when we heard the orchards were opening a couple weeks earlier than usual, we wanted to check things out for ourselves to see if the rumors of a bumper cherry crop were true. They are!

UR DESTINATION ON May 13 was the G&S Farms “Dixon” orchard off Sellers Avenue in Brentwood. We’re not sure why they call it the Dixon location, other than that there are several orchards the farm operates so perhaps that is just an easy way to identify them all. This site was entirely cherries, subdivided into sections that would be opened a few acres at a time over the coming weeks so as not to deplete the crop all at once. Tiogas were the variety initially available over Mother’s Day weekend.

Opening weekend of cherry season is always an insanely busy affair, with families coming in by the carload from the Bay Area to take home some fresh fruit. But usually the opening happens around Memorial Day, so we hoped that maybe word hadn’t spread too far yet and the crowds would be smaller. They were, sort of. At least we were able to find a parking spot on the dusty lot G&S Farms set aside for vehicles.

We had arrived close to noon, so not quite the ideal time of day to go fruit picking. Generally you want to go early in the morning when the weather is cooler and before the fruit softens up on the trees, making it mushier to pick. There were several dozen people waiting at the weighing tents when we got there, getting checked in and receiving plastic bags to carry their produce.

Checking in? Yes, that apparently has become a thing since the last time we picked fruit. We had to scan a QR code on our cell phones that took us to a website with a liability form we had to sign, essentially saying we accepted the risks involved with tromping around a fruit orchard and wouldn’t hold the farmer liable for any calamities that might occur along the way. Lawyers, gotta love ’em.

E DISCOVERED QUICKLY that although the trees were loaded down with cherries, finding pleasantly ripe ones was a bit of a challenge — “pleasant” being those that had grown a dark red and thus would be the sweetest. It wasn’t that the cherries weren’t still yummy even if they weren’t at their peak ripeness (we know because we had several samples along the way), but they probably could have used an extra week or two to be really ready, which would have meant showing up with all the crowds on Memorial Day weekend, which was what we were trying to avoid.

Nonetheless, we began to fill our bags with the mostly-ripe fruit, preferring to take from the low-lying branches rather than scale the rickety wooden ladders like others were using to reach the cherries lurking near the top of the canopy. In theory, the higher-up fruits ripen faster because they have more sun exposure, but we didn’t notice from our vantage point that the tops looked any riper. Perhaps the birds could tell the difference.

Roni, who had been taking photos of the orchard and interviewing people for a story she was working on for the newspaper, hadn’t spent much time picking fruit. Glenn made up the difference as he filled his bag while she talked. But soon we began to realize that we’d been working over the trees for a while and hadn’t come up with fruit that seemed any riper than when we’d started. And at $4 per pound, we thought maybe we didn’t want to go overboard on fruit we would have to figure out how to eat once we got it home. You can only bake so many cherry pies.

We were getting ready to call it a day when Glenn leaned into a cherry-laden tree so Roni could get a photo of him picking fruit — photos or it didn’t happen, right? He took a step forward to get his body further into the tree and squish. He looked down to find one shoe sinking into a giant mud puddle that hadn’t been there a moment before. (Well, that’s his story and he’s sticking to it.) He flashed back to having to fill out the liability waiver at the check-in stand. You expect to slip on fallen fruit or trip over pruned branches or irrigation equipment when you’re tromping around an orchard, but we hadn’t had any rain recently and it was a warm day and the orchard was dry in every other regard from the moment we entered it, so the thought of a mud puddle randomly appearing in one’s path hadn’t occurred to us. Fortunately the mud hadn’t risen above the top of the rubber sole and Glenn was able to extricate himself without further catastrophe. A minor mishap on what was otherwise a fun day of picking cherries.

We took our fruity loot back to the checkstand where they weighed it for us. Just a couple of pounds for 8 bucks and an inconvenient convenience fee they tacked on for paying with a credit card. (Note for next time: bring cash.) We didn’t need to worry about finding ways to use the fruit, because it was all gone within a few days, leaving us to plan our next trip to the U-picks. We’re waiting until after Memorial Day weekend, when hopefully there will still be plenty of cherries available as well as some early apricots, peaches and nectarines.

AST MONTH WE talked about plans for getting a new roof. We thought we would have secured our date by now, but we’ve been hung up with the financing part of the equation and haven’t had a lot of time to investigate all the options. The roofing company offers its own set of financing packages, although we aren’t convinced we can’t do better by taking out a home equity loan. It’s just our aversion to taking on debt to pay for things we can’t pay off in a couple of years, particularly in this cooling economy.

But we did do some preliminary searching of rates this month and just need to sit down with one of the banks to get the specifics of fees, payment terms, etc. In the process we discovered that our own regional bank where we’ve done business for more than 30 years was sold to another Colorado-based company earlier this year. We might never have realized if not for investigating the home equity loans. It’s easy to do when you just routinely pay your bills each month and don’t have much reason to visit their website.

The one thing we have figured out is that if we want to get our roof done, we definitely need to do some preliminary work around the yard so the workers can access the gutters they will be replacing. So on May 20 we set out for a morning of weeding and pruning. Roni worked in the front yard while Glenn decided to tackle the mock orange trees growing along the kitchen wall.

Well, theoretically they are supposed to be mock orange shrubs. The only reason they are trees now is that we’ve allowed them to become that way over more than two decades since we transplanted them from the front yard. They had grown so tall that they overhung the gutters and the edge of the roof, and were totally in the way.

Glenn decided to use our 14-inch Black & Decker electric hedge trimmer, thinking it would be the fastest way to take a few inches off the top. Perhaps that would have been the case for a smaller plant, but this one had 2-inch thick branches, too large to fit in the trimmer’s teeth. What did fit in the teeth, however, was Glenn’s fingers, as he painfully discovered when he accidentally hit the start trigger with the safety switch depressed while his hand was resting on the blade. (Lesson learned: wear gloves!)

Despite an abundance of blood, the cuts to his left index and middle fingers were less severe than they might have been. Nurse Roni worked her magic with a box of Band-aids and a tube of Neosporin, and fortunately no trip to the emergency room was necessary. One week later, the wounds have largely healed, although there will likely be scars to remember the day by.

To add insult to injury, while Glenn was sitting out the rest of the yardwork weekend nursing his hand, Roni merely took off the overgrown branches of the mock orange with the lopping shears. Glenn provided a bit of leverage with his good hand to get the cuts made, but the bulk of the job took less than 10 minutes. It has been so long since daylight has been able to penetrate the tops of the branches that we forgot how bright the kitchen window can be during the day. It will take some getting used to.

There is still more cleanup to do, but we’ll get there.

LENN'S HOME IMPROVEMENT skills fared somewhat better on May 14 when he completed yet another step in the long process of getting our fireplace built. Call it his small contribution to the cause on Mother’s Day. He hauled out the table saw and miter saw and sized up the baseboard strip that wraps around the front and sides of the hearth. It was a relatively simple job that could have been done months ago, but few things are simple anymore.

Ben’s Mother’s Day gift was delivering breakfast, which we all got to enjoy. He went out to Bagel Street Cafe in Antioch and texted us while we were still sleeping to ask what flavors of bagels we wanted. Naturally the place was busy for Mother’s Day, so by the time he reached the counter most of the good flavors were already gone, as well as our backup choices. But it was the thought that counted. We each got a couple of fresh bagels and cream cheese, even if they weren’t the perfect flavors.

Ben marked another birthday this month, reaching 29 on May 2. He celebrated by spending the day at work, but at least we got to have a nice meal and birthday cake together that evening. He chose to get sushi rolls that we had delivered, along with a chocolate raspberry ice cream cake from Cold Stone Creamery. Usually we’re lazy and do number candles, but this time Roni decided to go the traditional route with one small candle for each year. Things went fine until it came time to light the candles, and there were so many that she accidentally set the paper cake decorations on fire. No real harm done, but it was a dramatic moment.

We’ve been enjoying our time on YouTube lately, watching lots of travel videos in preparation for our upcoming European trip, checking out the coronation of King Charles III, and rotating among the dozens of live bird nest cams Roni especially enjoys. The one we’ve watched the most is the Cal Falcons live cam at the UC Berkeley campus, where peregrine falcons Annie and Lou recently finished raising their three chicks: Rosa, Luna and Zephyr. The babies fledged this week, so it looks like the show is over until next spring, but there are still lots of other hawks, eagles, hummingbirds and albatrosses that we continue to check in on. They’ve almost become like part of the family as Roni can tell you the backstories of most of them.

ELL IN MAY, go away.

That’s what is supposed to happen this time of year for stock traders, but it’s been sort of a mixed bag recently as the markets have been topsy-turvy amid the ongoing debt ceiling and interest rate hike drama coming out of Washington while companies report quarterly earnings.

On the one hand, falling prices aren’t what we want to see in our beaten-down taxable account where most of our small-cap growth stocks reside and which have been getting torched for more than a year and a half. But in our IRAs, we actually welcome lower prices as an opportunity to buy dividend stocks at a discount. One thing for certain is that if AI or artificial intelligence has anything to do with a company right now, you can bet that stock will be priced at a premium. We’ve seen our shares of AMD, Apple and Microsoft all bolt higher recently.

But not all are enjoying the ride higher. This month saw the liquidation of our investment in Virgin Orbit (VORBQ), which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April and sold off its assets last week. It is the first (but probably not the last) investment we’ve owned that has gone totally defunct. Meanwhile, we were forced to purchase shares of SunPower (SPWR), BlackSky (BKSY) and The RealReal (REAL) through options assignment at prices vastly higher that the stocks currently trade at. You might be familiar with the old gag about how to make a million dollars in the stock market? Start with $2 million. Actually, that would only be a 50 percent loss, and we own more than a few stocks that are down 60-90 percent or more.

Is there hope on the horizon? Well, the debt ceiling has been increased through the end of 2024 and there is still anticipation that the Federal Reserve will stop hiking interest rates soon. Summer tends to be a quiet time in the markets. We’ll cross our fingers and see.

That’s going to do it for this month. Hopefully we can shake the “June gloom” once June gets underway and summer officially arrives.

Just a cherry-picking minute

Glenn, Roni and Ben