The Waiting Game

You could call this period the calm before the storm.

The pieces are very nearly in place for the picking season. Loads of the strawberry plants have flowered and are boasting plenty of underripe berries, while the team is almost growing as quickly as this year’s crop.

The first ripened berries appeared during the final week of March and there were enough by the Bank Holiday to fill three boxes. They sold out within an hour in the farm shop and wholesalers are keen to get buying, as there’s already been requests for several hundred boxes.

I took this photo on March 19. The berries are so close to ripening.

There’s the odd thing to finish with the infrastructure, like lifting several hundred growbags from the floor onto the racking, but the starting pistol has been raised and it’s all very exciting.

Exciting for me, at least. Possibly for Mike and all the newcomers, too. But not for the boss, Graham.

“I hate this time of year,” he said to me during the short walk from the farm shop car park to the packhouse. Needless to say I asked why.

“It’s like purgatory. You want to get going and picking but you’re just waiting. Waiting for the berries, waiting for things to arrive. It’s just waiting and it’s annoying when you want to get on with it.”

I can see his point. There have been major developments at the farm since 2020 and big things are expected with all the investment and staffing changes that have taken place since last summer.

I think the biggest is probably the change of supervisor. Gone are Cristi and Madelina with Christian and his wife, Katarina, taking their place (apologies if I've spelt their names wrong). The pair are Romanian and Bulgarian, respectively, and previously worked on a fruit farm near Kirkcaldy in Scotland. The former was so keen on the job that he drove from Fife to Westlands and back in a day for a face to face interview with Graham instead of a Zoom chat.

I like them a lot and they both speak excellent English, which helps a great deal. Christian is quite laid back and the polar opposite in character to Cristi, who was quite fiery sometimes and often liked to put his foot down, be that with workers or the pedal to his BMW.

Christian, whose tractor journeys around the farm are far more sedate, probably comes from the Yorkshire equivalent of Romania because everything he does is proper. He was very particular about how the raspberry vines should be positioned – I will never forget his quip about wanting “sexy vines” – while each glasshouse was left pristine after he and team swept through like an Eastern European tornado.

His ideas have been a breath of fresh air and should boost productivity considerably. When he arrived last autumn Christian was bemused to find the pickers running to the weighing station with filled trays of berries, as all that time running could be spent picking. New trolleys, capable of holding up to nine boxes instead of the previous three, have been purchased, and should pay for themselves in weeks.

Big things are expected from the raspberry crop, too. All the best vines were moved from Redhill into the polytunnels at Ford while the poorer ones were chopped at the base and moved to a new outdoor site. The only thing missing is the polytunnels, as we spent a few weeks putting the vines in rows and providing the necessary infrastructure, from stakes and guide wires to irrigation. This was quite fun, actually, as Mike and I spent two days laying pipes in a trench, often standing in three feet of water.

In the trenches laying pipes to the new raspberry patch. This was great fun, actually.

Christian has overseen much of the work but the Romanian had a hand as he persuaded Graham to recruit a handful of his former workers from Scotland. The workers – who are all from Bulgaria and three of which are called Ahmed – arrived in January and were dazzling to watch. They laid and filled hundreds of growbags within a couple of days of arriving and their work rate is astounding. It’s also testament to Christian and their working relationship that the group were happy to follow their boss from the east coast of Scotland to the gentle landscape of South England.

I said hello, in Bulgarian, naturally, to the new workers when Christian gave them a brief tour while I had a little chat with one of the Ahmeds whilst cleaning Rumyana’s former caravan at Ford. After we both said hello to each other in English, I continued the conversation by saying “very good” to him in Bulgarian, as he was laying a gravel path at the time. He seemed surprised that I spoke a bit of his language.

“This man knows Mnogo Dobray,” he said to another worker, who was probably also called Ahmed.

“You speak Bulgarian?” to which I replied “a little”, before asking him his name in Bulgarian (kaz se kazvash). The highlight was saying “nice to meet you” (pre-yat-ten mia da se zapoz-ny-am) which he understood and said back. It took me a while to get my tongue around this phrase, so I was thoroughly pleased with the response.

I quite enjoyed cleaning the caravans and the new Bulgarians were certainly impressed as they wanted to swap their one at Ford for Rumyana’s having seen my skills with a mop, broom and sponge. The last caravan I cleaned was a new arrival and was previously based in Porthcawl, South Wales. I know that because there was a Post Office receipt in one of the cupboards while the previous owner was definitely a dog person, as I found plenty of canine treats and a couple of squeaky toys during the clean-up.

The Bulgarians now have a bit more company as the legendary Constantin returned during the penultimate week of March while his brothers will arrive in a fortnight along with a few more workers from Eastern Europe. A few more migrants also arrived at Luton around the same time as Constantin although I’ve yet to meet or see any of them.

I’m expecting to see one or two familiar faces and one name that keeps popping up is Rumyana, who told Graham she was keen to return when her final shift finished in mid-December.

I have a lot of respect for Rumyana. The berries she picked were always top-notch and she definitely didn’t suffer fools gladly. Yes there was an occasional disagreement, and she talked quite a bit in her native tongue, but she always did a good job. She was one of the oldest workers on the farm and I felt sorry for her last December, as it can’t be easy living on your own in a foreign country when you don’t speak the language, especially when the nights are long and dark.

Rumyana in the Hampshire Bowman pub garden. I'm looking forward to sharing a pint with her and some of the Westlands workers in this magnificent watering hole this summer.

I would love to meet some of the other pickers again – Ahmed, Jhivko, Mitko and the Turkish contingent, especially – but there’s always Facebook if this doesn’t happen. I still harbour hopes of taking the former three to a Pompey match as they expressed an interest last year but Covid restrictions scuppered that plan.

Picking will have probably begun by the time I publish my next blog entry and I will have savoured my first Westlands strawberry of 2021 long before then. The more I write the more I share Graham’s impatience, because I also want the waiting to finish.