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.
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