Cajun Engineering - A Titillating Tale of Redneck Fabrication

This weekend was a gorgeous day.  We went outdoors with a ladder and began harvesting tangerines and navel oranges off of our trees.  The old folks say that after you get a frost or freeze, the sugars intensify in the fruit and yield a sweeter product.  I haven't been able to get a firm answer on if this is true or not.  Temperatures dipped below freezing for two days last week, so if this was true, our fruit would be super sweet.  

We went outside an picked several baskets of fruit.  We encountered one small problem - our trees are growing each year and this year was the first year that we could not reach the fruit on the top of the tree.  Even utilizing a ladder proved ineffective.  The trees were just to doggone tall.  What to do?  You can see one of the tangerines WAAAAAYYYYY up there in the photo below, bordering the upper atmosphere.

I went inside and looked up Lehman's "For a Simpler Life" Hardware on the Internet.  I enjoy looking at their goods.  They are hand-crafted Amish products that help enhance your life.  I located a Fruit Harvester tool under the Apple Harvest tab.  It was $29.95.  Not a bad price at all, but due to Covid and other factors, shipping & processing is delayed.  I don't have time to wait.

A running joke in rural areas is that if you give a man a roll of duct tape and baling twine, he can fix most anything.  I began to think that I could build my own fruit harvester tool with a little Cajun ingenuity and it would cost me exactly $0.  So I built my own Fruit Harvester tool that is capable of reaching fruit that grows up in heights on top of the trees where the air is thin.  I rooted around in the garage and in the back of the house, found some odds and ends, grabbed some duct tape and fabricated what I call, "Kyle's Deluxe Citrus Snatcher."  (Patent Pending)  You can view the prototype lying beneath the ladder below in a photo captured by a corporate spy.

Let's take a closer look below.  I had an old garden hand tool whose handle had broken.  I cut off the broken end of the handle and jammed it into a piece of 3/4 inch PVC pipe.  I used duct tape to firmly fasten the garden tool on the PVC pipe.  The tool does not telescope, per se, but it does somewhat telescope by fitting a second joint of PVC into the other for those really high, hard to get tangerines.

You can see an example of what it looks like in action below in a simulated example (but on the ground - not an aerial shot).  You reach up and get the prongs behind the fruit and firmly pull downward.  The fruit promptly snaps off the branch and tumbles to the ground below.

Beautiful fruit that was once unobtainable is now within your grasp!

But wait!  There's more.  If you act now, you can own your own Deluxe Citrus Snatcher...

Sorry, my factory is not built yet.  You'll have to build your own.