Our friend who runs the point Loma rotary club invited us to orange picking in Rancho Santa Fe for the local food banks. So we drove up to do a short hike first in horse country. The houses were beautiful and sprawling with ranches vineyards and citrus groves everywhere

The initial path of the wildflower walk was deceptively steep going up and then as steep going down into the canyon towards the stream, with beautiful views of all the way down and sounds of the flowing stream below

The path along the river was lovely, with some huge trees that had fallen over lifting their entire route system into the air.

The path climbed up and up the side of the canyon was lovely with lots of wildflowers and birds which twittered away.

Then through several horse ranches where we saw a lovely white horse with a unicorn platted forelock, and cute tiny donkeys

We drove by our friends Greg and Celines house and gave them one of my marmalades, and they gave us six eggs laid that morning! we also dropped a lime marmalade at Seth’s, and drove over to the church where the Rotarians were meeting.

We introduced ourselves and once Karin showed up, the group drove around the corner to the citrus grove which was part of a lovely estate. We thought we would exhaust the supply of oranges quickly, so picked a tree that was heavy with fruit. We filled up three crates, and had only done about 30% of what was on the tree! Hauling the oranges back to the tarp where we washed, dried and bagged them ended up taking a lot longer than the picking itself.

In all, our group of 8-10 probably picked 1500 oranges for the food banks, and we took some for ourselves also!

Then back home for a quick hair trim, soft boiled egg with buttered toasted and D saw Curran for her back. We invited her to stay for dinner and finally had my cornflour chapatis with the remains of the keema, lovely artichokes and my cheesecake/ key lime pie 🥧👍🏼❤️