People of the World: Stop Eating Apples

After the relative luxury of the WWOOFing, where we did work hard but for only 4 hours a day, had dinner cooked for us and lived in our own cabin with bathroom, we always knew that the apple picking would be an adjustment. We're back to living in the van, which is lovely actually, but sharing cooking and bathroom facilities again which is a bit of pain (2 loos, 2 showers, 1 sink, 22 people). No internet of course. And then there's the actual picking.

Picking apples is hard. HARD. You have a bag strapped to your front into which you have to place each apple you pick - place, not drop, because otherwise they bruise. When they are full they weigh between 15 and 20kg, which means that your back and shoulders ache like hell by the end of the day. A full bag contains around 100 apples, which takes around 5-15 mins to fill, depending on how fast you go and how easy the apples are to reach and pick. It takes around 20 bags to fill a bin, and we get paid $30 per bin we fill. Every bin you pick has 25 apples taken from it at random, which are examined for 'picker damage', bruising, stem breaks, stem punctures, fingernail marks. A dollar is taken off your bin for every apple found to be damaged. Many of the apples you pick have insects living in and around them - spiders, earwigs, wasps - so you often find an unwelcome passenger as you put the apples in your bag. I find it's best not to look too hard. Each new variety* requires a different technique - e.g. twisting to remove or looping up and over the branch - and takes some getting used to before you're back up to speed. The trees are tall, so you need a ladder to reach the top half and you often find yourself teetering on tippy toes up at the very top of the ladder, holding on to a branch (hoping it doesn't break) and straining to reach all the apples you can. If you don't reach them all, you get bollocked - I got told 'You pick them ALL' by the tractor driver the other day, who threw my ladder against the tree and dismissed my protests that I couldn't reach them. 'Well I can reach them' he said, 'Oh great,' I replied 'well can you get them down for me then? It's just I'm not 6ft 3...' He then threw the apples at Isaac and myself stroppily. My arms are covered in scratches from reaching into the trees. The first bag I was given had a had plastic case which was a little too big for me, so it pressed on my thighs and made walking and climbing ladders both difficult and painful. I have a colourful array of bruises** to show for it, not including those I get whenever I accidentally kick or slip down the ladder. Fortunately, the bosses heard my complaints about how bruised I was and they bought me a new bag, brand new, which has a soft surround and is smaller, and therefore shorter, so it no longer hurts my legs. Now it just puts more strain on my shoulders instead. Hurray! Isaac and I did the maths on our first week's picking. If it takes 100 apples to fill a bag, and 20 bags to fill a bin, that's 2000 apples per bin. We picked 4 bins the first day, 5 bins the next two days and 6 bins per day for the last two. This means we picked 52,000 apples in our first week. It bloody feels like it too. My only hope now is to try to persuade the people of the world to stop eating apples, so demand will go down and we can get laid off with severance pay. Please tell all your friends.

But I guess it's not all bad. We get to be outside in the open air, now the fierce heat of summer has dissipated into a more pleasant warmth, and because we're working a fairly physical job it's even quite nice when it rains (lightly at least). We finish at 4.30pm, which gives us the rest of the afternoon and evening to relax, something we sorely need by then. We've made friends with some of the other pickers, most particularly with a Kiwi couple called Stu and Holly, who have done a fair bit of fruit picking in their time and know all the tips and tricks. They come over to our aisle at break time in the morning with a flask of coffee, and we sit on the grass and drink it feeling, for all of 10 minutes, like kings, and in the evening we often hang out with them in their cabin and chat. The bugs aren't too bad here. We get weekends off to lie in and explore the area - this weekend we went to a car show in Nelson where we watched people drive round in circles until their tyres blew up (I'm told by Isaac that this is what they're supposed to do, and that it's very cool, though I think it's a bit of a waste myself). And anytime in the rest of my life if someone tells me "You've never done a hard day's work in your whole life, have you?" I'll sure as hell have my answer ready for them...

*we've done Cox's Orange Pippins and Royal Gala so far - moving onto pears next week which is totally different and much harder, or so I'm led to believe by the people who know these things
** par for the course for me of course. Poor Isaac. He's never even SEEN me without being covered in bruises from skiing, climbing trees, carrying logs etc. He must think purple is the normal skin colour for English people.