Blessed be the fruit

More than three months have passed since I posted my last entry on this blog and by golly a lot has changed since then.

The biggest change is that I’m now a married man as I tied the knot with Nicky on July 17. I am not exaggerating when I say it was the best day of my life. I could spend hours writing about the big day and the lead up, but I’ll keep that for another time as this blog is about my farmyard adventures.

What I will say though is that the lead up was EXTREMELY STRESSFUL as we changed our reception venue with a few weeks to go because of restrictions and the incompetence of our original hosts. I brought my laptop into work most days because I spent every lunchtime trying to sort out venue, catering and other wedding costs that would have otherwise been taken care of.

So I put writing on the back burner and now things have quietened down I hope to upload posts on here more regularly. I must say it’s nice to get writing again because even though I wrote my last newspaper story some 16 months ago, I will never stop putting my thoughts to paper or screen because I find it relaxing and enjoyable. Along with Lego and snooker, writing is one of my biggest pleasures.

As for changes on the farm, the biggest has probably involved staff. There’s been a quite a turnover this summer, partly because of some reasons I’m not going to get into here, but there seems to be a settled team now and even Graham is resting a bit easier after a period of headbashing.

Our picking team has been a mixture of returning workers, agency recruits from home and abroad and local people trying their hand at farming. Westlands always tries to recruit locally first, but only a few stay for an extended period and many decide it’s not for them after a day.

We’ve got a nice little cohort of local people on the farm at the moment: France-born Sam lives in Portsmouth and is giving farming a go after a career in cross-Channel ferries and transport, while south Hampshire teenagers Billy and Harry are earning a bit of money at Westlands before they go to university. The later is something of a young Sheldon and is brilliant at maths.

The remainder of the pickers are mostly Bulgarians with a few Romanians thrown into a very international mix. The new Bulgarians on the planting line seem to be obsessed with whisky and barbecues and are much more talkative than those who appeared on the farm since the turn of the year.

I’ve been getting to know the picking team over the last fortnight as I’ve been allowed out of the packhouse after a summer overseeing the conveyor belt.

Holding the 50,000th punnet to roll off the Westlands Farm conveyor belt. I can date this photo to late May because of my pre-lockdown hair.

Because picking, coupled with the odd staff issue, took precedence Katarina was moved to Ford and Redhill to oversee a team of pickers, effectively leaving me in charge of the packhouse. I’ve thus been given a promotion of sorts although I very rarely lead a team of packers as it’s usually myself, Steve and Mike in the shed on packing days.

Photographic proof of passing the 50,000 mark. We're now closing on 150,000 and may have passed it at the time of writing.

Although the extra money and responsibility is nice the downside to being in the packhouse is that I rarely get to enjoy the great British summertime. I’ve watched Mike become increasingly tanned due to his constant fruit ferrying between the polytunnels and the packhouse, while I’ve become something of a hermit, packing fruit, overseeing paperwork, and constantly tidying in my twilight world. I’ll admit that sometimes it can get a bit repetitive and my mind occasionally wanders to my past career and all its variety.

It’s been a decent year for the farm as we were ahead of the game when it came to strawberry and raspberry production this year. At one stage we were the only farm supplying the cooperative with strawberries and our raspberries hit the shelves earlier than many other producers, too.

The Centenary plants we and Christian’s workers planted in January in the glasshouses have produced a bumper crop, although we did have a glut of small-ish berries early on in the harvest. Perhaps even better were the plants we’ve propagated from last year’s crop, which leads me full circle back to Ford and those first few weeks I spent at Westlands.

Here’s my 2020 propagation work in a few paragraphs: A few days into my farming tenure (June 2020) I was sent to Ford to cut runners (strawberry plant offshoots) before planting them into trays and placing them under sprinklers. A month later the plants were transferred from trays to growbags, rigged up to irrigation and left outside for a few months. They’re trimmed in September to leave the stronger stems before being transferred to the polytunnels early in the year.

I’ve gone into this process more in depth in this blog so I won’t go into the details again but needless to say we’ve begun the 2021/2022 cycle and today (August 10) we have all but finished the transfer stage. Our merry team have replanted close to 80,000 plants into growbags and pots with our knees and hands now getting a well-deserved rest.

Not sure this photo does the scale of the strawberry plant crop the justice it deserves, really. But there's close to 80,000 in this photo, all inserted by hand.

Because picking has slowed down a bit and there’s less to pack, I found myself at Ford for the first time in months to help out with transferring.

I am a pretty fast planter due to experience and sometimes I just put on some headphones and get on with it. I recently timed myself and discovered that I filled 172 growbags in just over four hours. So that’s 1,720 plants in one shift, or a growbag every minute and a half. Not bad.

I’m enjoying the job more than last year because of the people around me. When I was planting under Christi and Madelina absolutely no-one spoke English so I often felt isolated and found myself counting down the hours to home-time. The job was a necessity, though, and I couldn’t walk away because I had bills to pay and didn’t have the luxury of furlough money.

While it’s still a tad repetitive, the job has been more enjoyable this year because there are English people on the planting trailer – Harry, Billy, a former roofer called Geoff and the occasional trialist – and the Bulgarians I’m working with are quite friendly. They speak a little bit of English, but I’ve helped myself by trying to learn their lingo. I’ve been a bit lax on the learning recently as I haven’t seen much of the Bulgarians in recent months but that’s changed being so close to them. So when I enter the fray after a morning’s packing I always get a cheery welcome from them with pleasantries on both sides. They keep asking me why I haven’t brought whisky, so I’ll have to surprise them some Friday or Sunday.

So what of the previous Bulgarians? I’ve got to be careful here but what I can say is that Rumyana is the last worker standing from the class of 2020. All of Christi’s gang from Scotland have moved on along with many of their countrymen and women who have found themselves at Westlands since January and July.

Two were among the worst workers I’ve ever come across. Within an hour at arriving at Westlands they complained about the lack of a plasma television in their caravan and they cut their first day’s picking short because it was too hot in the greenhouse.

The following day they blankly refused to cut runners because “they didn’t feel like it” while a few days later they asked for sick pay as they both were off work because of a headache. Needless to say they didn’t last long with their paycheck covering the cost of a taxi to Luton Airport for the flight home.

Farming isn’t for everyone and some of the trialists decided not to stay after a day’s work. One arriving at Ford didn’t even get out of the car as they went up the track, had a drive around and turned straight back towards the main road to Botley. The mind really boggles sometimes.

So now we’re up to date I hope you’ve enjoyed reading. I’ve got plenty ideas for future entries and I might start writing the next one later today. I think the next will focus on the letter C as cows, caravans and Jeremy Clarkson will feature heavily. Oh Yes.