Five Months Later

Of all the languages to learn, Bulgarian was pretty low on my “give it a go” list six months ago.

But I’ve started learning these last few weeks and my Eastern European friends on the farm have been impressed and appreciative with my progress so far.

I didn’t in have much contact with the pickers in my first few weeks as I was pretty much confined to the packhouse during high summer, but I’ve been in awe of them ever since my introduction to life on the farm.

My first day was a hot one and I spent much of it shadowing Graham’s right hand man, Ryan. He spent most of his day ferrying trays, punnets and pallets between the farm’s three sites in Wickham, Shedfield and Bishop’s Waltham before delivering hundreds of boxes of berries to a distribution depot in Yapton, a few miles shy of Arundel.

The packhouse can be found behind the farm shop and is where all the punnets of strawberries and raspberries are checked, labelled and packed into boxes before heading out to the depots, greengrocers and markets of southern England. At the weighing end of the line is two Bulgarians called Iva and Gulyhan and they are overseen by a supervisor called Madalina (apologies if I’ve spelt her name wrong), a Romanian woman with more than a decade of experience in berry farming work.

The packhouse also contains a massive chiller where berries are cooled down and stored. Getting them from the fields and glasshouses to the chiller after they’ve been picked is especially important on hot days as the berries lose a day of shelf life for every hour they

spend in the open after picking.

The berries are grown in a cluster of greenhouses at Redhill, a short walk across the field of lambs behind the packhouse, and Ford, a polytunnel complex about a mile south of Bishop’s Waltham.

Around 20 pickers are ferried between the two sites on a daily basis and are overseen by Madalina’s other half, Christy. Both speak decent English and have an air of authority about them.

I found myself in the thick of things a few hours after arriving on the farm, lugging trays of raspberries and strawberries into the refrigeration lorry and getting used to driving it around and between the various sites. I am also quickly taken back to my Safeway days by using pallet jacks to transport the pallets from the truck to the chiller.

I learn during the morning that I’m the first British person the farm has employed for the picking and farming side of things for a decade. A few people have tried, but most have barely lasted the day with some thinking the experience will be akin to a Pick Your Own getup. It’s not.

In high summer Westlands has plenty of custom, with orders for local firms like Edwards of Shedfield and Fruit Basket of Stubbington along with depots in Arundel, Southampton and Bristol.

Around 500 boxes – each box contains eight to ten punnets of strawberries or raspberries – are filled and delivered on a typical Sunday with a pallet holding the maximum of 100. My final job is to drive half a dozen of these pallets to Arundel before returning to Westlands.

The reward for my first 8-5 day is two punnets and the offer of employment. Both were gratefully accepted and I sleep well on the back of a physically exhausting, but thoroughly enjoyable, day.

Strawberries waiting to be picked in one of the Westlands glasshouses.