Orchard Living

The orchard on Okanagan Lake, between Ok Centre and Coral Beach, was originally planted by Russell Postill who had started R.E. Postill & Sons Contracting in 1944. According to a long-time excavator operator, Louis, the family never lived out there but spent some summers and building the orchard was probably just an excuse for Russell to get away from the business. Louis used to be tasked to go and help build, plant, whatever but ended up playing crib with Russell. In 1971, when I first moved there, Russell had passed away and the business and orchard were being managed by his son Russ.

The orchard was a long, narrow twenty acres between East Side Road and the lake and was primarily cherries with some apricot and peach trees. There was a comfortable two-bedroom house, a pickers shack, a boat house and a barn. Don and Sue Meyer, with three kids soon to be four, lived in the farm house and I was offered the pickers shack when I needed a place to live. The shack needed some work but was eminently liveable and so I moved in.

In the spring, I moved my girl-friend Betty up as well, with a 1952 International Harvester pick-up, and we set up housekeeping together. The inside toilet didn't work and the outhouse had nests of Black Widow spiders under the seat, so that became a priority with the lady of the house. I dug up the drain field for the septic tank and found that the concrete drain pipes, each about 12 inches long, had been packed full of cherry pits by mice. I guess these storage tunnels, dry for most of the year, made a lot of sense to the mousies but played havoc with the drainage from the septic tank. 

In the winter of 1972, Don and Sue were saving to buy their own farm in northern BC and, in an unconsidered moment, didn't supply enough hay for the horses who proceeded to ring the bark of some of the cherry trees. Don and Sue were gone when young Russ discovered the damage and told me loudly and at length what he thought of that. Russ, like many successful managers of men, kept up a loud, colourful harangue while he made up his mind about you. In the end I was asked to look after the orchard and bring in the crop. Russ wanted nothing in return, continued to pay the irrigation hydro bill and charged us $75.00 per month to live in the farm house. Our friend Reg and family moved into the pickers shack.

Working in an orchard on the shores of Okanagan Lake was really pleasant. The winters were milder there than elsewhere because of the moderating effect of a body of water that is nearly 75 miles long by 2 miles wide at its widest and 900 feet deep in places. In the summer, with temperatures  often in the mid to high 30s celsius, work took place under a canopy of green shade interspersed with dips in the lake. The real work was moving the irrigation pipes morning and evening, spraying for cherry fruit fly, mowing between the trees, and managing pickers and fruit when things got ripe. I was basically a city kid and when I used to look at an orchard, all I saw was a sea of green. After working intimately with the trees, ones perspective changes. I can drive by orchards now and keep up a commentary on tree species from just a glance at the shape or the leaves or bark.

In the summer of 1974, Betty's brother Rob came from Ontario to help with the Orchard. Betty and I had decided to get married and we tracked down a retired, female United Church minister who was willing to come out to the orchard and marry us in a non-traditional ceremony. After the cherry harvest, just as the peaches were ripening, friends and family came from Ontario, California, Calgary, and Vancouver. The parents, aunts and uncles were put up in cabins at Pixie Beach Resort and the younger crew camped out in whatever was available in the orchard.

The bar was a plank on apple boxes and the wedding cakes were orange torts from the Grass Tea Room and Conditorei in Kelowna. We were wed beneath the branches of mature apricot trees which I still think are the prettiest of all the fruit trees.

We were living in the orchard when our first child, Erin, was born. Baby was born in the early hours of the morning and I can still vividly remember the pre-dawn indigo of the sky over Rutland and Highway 33, as I headed home, with the fading stars twinkling. I picked up a north-bound hitchhiker who thought it was "Cool, man", when I told him of my night. Reg came up to the house when he heard the VW come home and we had an obligatory cigar as the sun chased the shadow down the hills on the far shore of Okanagan Lake.

That summer, 1975, went quickly and it was the last in the orchard. We moved out in the fall as I had been accepted into shop teacher training down at the coast and I had a year in which to make money for a year in school. Land prices were cheap then but it is all relative as wages were cheap too. I wouldn't have been able to carry the mortgage on the orchard no matter how nice the lifestyle was. So the current of life carried us on to other things.