Week 29-30 "Last week of Fruit picking"

Our last week at Shepparton was really good and we squeezed as much in as possible.

We had a pizza night at "The Lodge" ( it a nice name for the old sheering quarters ) every one made pizza's from the ground up, pizza dough and all.

We all did a bloody good job too...nice work guy's.

We all visited a local wine festival at Tatura, its a nice little town just down the road and at the festival they had a hands on reptile display for everyone ( at a wine festival? ) but it was tops, everyone had a go.

Blue tongue lizards

 Tree snakes 

Fresh water croc's

And they did have some really nice local wines.

As I mentioned at the end of the last post, The Rain Came.....

This spot is only just down the road from where we are staying.

It usually has only a couple of meters of water in it but this week it rose to over 10 meters.

But we did get a lot of rain in the area.

Look closely at the above photos, note the big tree on the right and the fallen tree to the left, all under water.

And below is when its not under water. We went down to the river a couple of times after work for a feed and just some time away from camp, it was good to get away for a couple of hours.

Special thanks to Jay n Kate and Ryan n Carolyn, you guy's are legends and thanks heaps for making our stay a lot more fun. We can't wait to catch up with you guy's again.

Wish you were here.

Week 23 to 29 "Fruit picking"

Yay.......... Fruit picking.
Be warned, it's nothing like the stories you hear but you will ( or should ) get to meet some great people. They will help share the pain....

Speaking of very nice people, we hooked up with these guy's and gal's at the farm we were staying at.

From the left : Jay, Kate, Ryan and Carolyn. That's Fiona on the right. 

More on these guy's to come.

This is our camp site at the farm, and nice and cheap which is good cause we didn't make any money?

"Peaches" 

Millions of peaches, peaches for me. ( its a song )

Ah peaches, what can I say. They are hairy/furry/fluffy little balls of itchiness, the peach hair will get in everywhere if you are unprepared, we were unprepared and know one told us any different so we had to learn the hard way.

 Best advise - just try to cover everything....  

We picked 3 different types of peaches most of which were numbers 215 and so on? not names

We also picked 3 types of pears = Bosc, Packham and Josephine 

and 2 types of apples = Granny smith and Gala

Apart from the fruit attacking you, we had days when the work conditions were just awesome...

Nothing like walking around in slop and climbing metal ladders for 8 hours of your day, but hay the $7- an hour we were getting paid makes it all worth while..............NOT.

For those who have no idea on fruit picking ( us included )

You get paid for what you pick ( sounded good - work hard, get paid )

OK you get paid per bin ( crate ) on average a bin holds nearly "half a ton" of fruit, for this bin you will be paid from $28- to $38- a full bin depending on the fruit and whether its a size pick or strip pick.

On average we picked 4 bins a day, that's as a couple ( 2 bins each ) we did have the rare day when the picking was really good and you could pick 6 + bins but this involves lots of easily accessible fruit and little ladder work, we probably had 3 of these days in 6 weeks of picking.

Most of the time you are climbing up and down a 10-12 foot ladder ( with shoes covered in mud ) fighting through a tree to find some fruit which you then put into a bag on your chest and carry around all day, the bags hold around 20kg of fruit.

This is the farm we were working for.

This is a Packham pear.

and a Bosc pear.

Then the rain came. And lots of it.