Pole axed

You know you’ve worked exceptionally hard when even the farm hand, usually a tower of strength, admits things have been tough.

When the Westlands Farm crew broke up for their inaugural Christmas break in December, talk was of a quiet-ish winter and a relatively easy start to 2021. The biggest job on the “to-do” list was moving some of the poorer raspberry plants out of the glasshouses and replacing them with several hundred ready-grown ones, which were ordered before Crimbo and expected to arrive in mid-January.

That remained the plan for the first full working week of January and thus the great Westlands raspberry shuffle kicked off on the fourth. The three us – myself, Ryan the farm hand and his brother, Mike – moved hundreds of plants from the glasshouses at Redhill to the polytunnels and open fields of Ford.

The plan remained the same until Thursday when Graham received some very bad news. The new raspberry plants could not be delivered, leaving the farm with four empty glasshouses and no crop to fill them with.

The temperature often dipped below freezing during February, causing the glasshouse windows to ice over. This picture did prompt one of my best ever puns, though: I see a little silhouette of a ram. You can take the journalist out of the office...

Cannabis, Crystal Meth and Cocaine were briefly considered as possible crops while frantic calls were made to secure alternative plants. Sadly, no raspberry plants were available so the decision was made to grow strawberry plants instead, with a juvenile crop being sourced and ordered from a producer somewhere in Norfolk.

Turns out that sourcing the plants was the easy bit. You see, strawberry and raspberry plants have very different set ups, from grow bags to irrigation, so all the resulting infrastructure had to be changed in just a fortnight.

There was no time to waste. For the rest of the week Mike and I removed several hundred wooden stakes from the four glasshouses along with the batons and twine which previously kept the raspberry plants standing straight and true.

Beech House once all the raspberry plants had been removed...

...followed by all the stakes and foliage. We've since driven 13 rows of poles into this space, but I haven't taken a picture yet.

That was easy compared to the next task – pile driving over 1,600 metal poles into rows, each individually driven into the ground with an petrol-driven post banger that weighed a ton. On each occasion Mike hoisted the banger into place while I guided the vibrating post into the ground. This may have left me with RSI, as I wake up with stiff hands every morning these days.

Hard to believe this glasshouse was full of raspberry plants about a fortnight before this picture was taken. This picture gives you an idea of just how many poles Mike and I drove into the ground over the week, as Field House was only half finished at this stage.

It didn’t get any easier as that was followed by punching holes in irrigation pipes laid on the floor. Holes are punched manually every 20centimetres with a screwdriver-like device and there were 24 pipes alone in Field House. Mike and I did the job on our knees and we had to continually wrap our hands with plasters, bandages and gloves to prevent blistering from the constant pressing of the screwdriver into the palm.

I dread to think how many holes we punched but it must have been well over 20,000 and we filled them all with drippers. Thankfully we didn’t have to fill the growbags with the new strawberry plants, as a new cohort of Bulgarians from the supervisor’s former farm in Scotland did that very job.

Amazingly, we did all this in a fortnight and the praise from our superiors was as glowing as the fire in the most homely of country pubs.

“I’ll be honest with you, the last two weeks have probably been the hardest I’ve had on the farm since joining,” I said to Ryan towards the end of January.

“They probably have been the hardest we’ve had,” he replied, with Graham encouraging us to treat ourselves to takeaway as we’ve really earned it.

“You’ve done an awesome job,” said his dad, Steve, at the end of the first day of hole punching. It’s important to remember the compliments.

One of the most satisfying elements of working on a farm is that you can visibly see the results of your hard work. Many of the strawberry plants have grown from runners I cut and potted, while I’ve had a hand in near enough all the infrastructure in the glasshouses.

It won’t be long now until Constantin and his Eastern European chums arrive for the 2021 fruit picking season. It will almost be like they’ve never been away, with all the infrastructure in place and the fruits ready for picking. The first harvest will be an amazing sight as the some of the earliest strawberries are the size of cricket balls.

The pair of us can’t wait for the picking to begin and to see the glasshouses full of luscious berries and enthusiastic pickers. But we will never forget the early effort, nor the days of aching muscles and weekend work that we put in to make it possible.

You could say the pickers will benefit from the fruits of our labour.