I am back after a vacation and ready to get back to work. Vacations are great and I enjoyed mine, but I was excited to come back to work and get started on a few projects.
By Kyle Kennedy
The Ledger
Publix Super Markets Inc. is taking a page from the restaurant industry for its latest innovation: Curbside carry out. Spokeswoman Shannon Patten said the company recently began testing a curbside service for deli items at a store in Fort Myers, allowing customers to have things like subs, salads and fried chicken delivered to their cars. "For customers who are time-starved it's a way for them to consider us as an option for lunch or dinner," Patten said. "It's convenient." Patten said the program works similar to a restaurant curbside service, in which customers phone in orders, park in designated spaces and submit their payment to an employee. She said Publix allocated a handful of parking spaces near the deli entrance at the Fort Myers site and monitors them with a video camera. Publix began testing the program about a week ago and has no current plans to expand it, Patten said.
From a distance, the white tree stumps perched on the slopes of San Diego County's mountainsides may look stark and eerie to the inexperienced eye, but for avocado farmer Al Stehly, each stump represents a new beginning for an orchard that took an awful beating from January's freeze. "The freeze pretty well wiped out this grove," Stehly said. "We got hardly any fruit out of this grove, maybe a couple of hundred pounds.” The severe damage left by this winter's cold blast has prompted many avocado growers to take chainsaws to their trees, cutting away so much dead wood that only the stumps are remaining. But the trees aren't dead, said Stehly. Farmers stump their trees to bring new life back to them. "It's kind of an age-old practice," said Gary Bender, University of California Cooperative Extension farm advisor in San Diego County. "I think avocado is the only tree you can do that with. They're so hardy that they come back very readily from a stump.”
