I'm Ziv. I spent eleven years as a project manager shipping software, and then one spring I inherited my grandmother's apricot trees. People assume that was a career change. It was not. It was a platform migration.

The first season nearly broke me. Apricots all ripen at once, with no respect for capacity planning. Fruit fell. Fruit rotted. Birds — the birds operated entirely outside of process. By July I had lost half the harvest and most of my dignity. I sat under the oldest tree and admitted the truth out loud: I had no system.

So I did what I knew. I opened YouTrack, created a project called ORCH, and filed the first issue: ORCH-1: Apricots exist and I am not ready. I closed it three months later. It remains the most important ticket I have ever written.

An apricot is just a deliverable with a shelf life. Treat it with the respect you'd give any deadline and it will reward you.

Today the orchard runs on a board I am genuinely, unironically proud of. Each tree is an epic. Each branch is a component. Each apricot is an issue with a custom field for sun exposure, a state-machine workflow, and an SLA measured in days-until-mush. When a fruit reaches peak ripeness, an automation rule pings my phone. I walk out, I pick it, I move the card to Done. I have never felt more whole.

Is it overkill to run an enterprise issue tracker for forty kilos of fruit? My neighbor thinks so. My neighbor also lost his entire plum crop to "vibes-based harvesting" last year, so I no longer take his architectural feedback. The board stays.

This site is where I write it all down — the wins, the rot, the workflow diagrams I draw on napkins. It is funny because it is absurd. It is serious because the apricots are real, and so is the joy. Welcome to the orchard. Mind the open tickets.

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Leave a note for Ziv. It becomes a real ticket in the ORCH project, stored on the orchard's edge. Triaged within one sprint, no promises.

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