Every fall we dig up fruit trees that are going to be shipped around the nation to professional orchardists and backyard growers.

We still do a lot of the work by hand—gathering, bundling, lifting, cataloguing, and storing.  But we take a mechanized approach to digging the trees up.

This is the digging rig.  It planes down beneath the roots, thanks to the heft of homemade cement weights fashioned from apple crates, and the agitating motion uproots the trees.

A few lads walk behind the tractor and shake the dirt off the roots and bundle them up to put in the pickup truck.

The trees are placed in passive cold storage for the winter, keeping them dormant til shipping season in the spring.