Fact is, you can’t travel around this region without running into this lady & her sisters.

But they seem to prefer forest-leisure, always straying so far away from actual worksites.🤔 🌱

Where little else grows, you'll always find a feral fig infiltrating the walls of a ruin. 🌱Fieldwork sighting - 🏺Meghri, Armenia.

Harvest time! Many farmers cultivate kiwi in their yards on low-slung, homemade pergolas. Still, no plantations exist in southern Armenia.

Any kiwis you find in formal markets are gonna be cheap imports from Iran. 🌱🥝

In theory, it only gets better from here.

Happy solstice from Akhateli Acres!

Desolate hilltop, peering through this tall wild rose (rubiginosa?) 🌱🏵️ toward the mountains of northernmost Iran.

This 🧵 is a glimpse of the annual persimmon harvest in tropical #Meghri, #Syunik province, #Armenia.

This town is the source of our farm’s persimmon trees 🌱

And here’s what its like to be lost in a maze of drying fruit. Sweet as dates, size of mandarins:

Many churches/monasteries have adjacent gardens tended by clergy. But few mediaeval cemeteries get this deluxe treatment of being converted into a compact fruit/nut orchard.

Much respect to the keeper of these grounds.

The massive stones are grave markers.

#Yerevan #Armenia #agriculture 🌱 🌾 🌿

Scarlet displays our vineyard - still hanging on through autumnal gales.

These are chkhaveri grapevines, a red cultivar native to the mountains above the Black Sea.

They make the finest rosé in the Caucasus. 🌱🍇

Vestigial flower holding on to a giant, mature pomegranate. Meghri, Syunik, Armenia - where autumn has barely started. 🌱

A very special little 🍇 harvest on this young vine. 🌱

🌱 Hang them to dry under every sheltered surface and build an entire agricultural economy upon them. Is what we'd do.

❤️ persimmons

This accidentally artful block of tufa will be placed in our Armenian agricultural section, along with hundreds of other stones transported for that purpose.

Every farmer becomes an amateur geologist eventually🗿🌋🌱