Today is my first day working in an orchard. C., the woman with the bus and now my colleague, brought me in. She is a Quality Controller and has worked in the orchards for seven years now. Apple picking is exhausting but I can manage.
The first day of picking was on juice apples. This is the last pick of the tree after they have taken all of the good stuff off it already. What is left is stripped off the tree and sent off to be made into stuff like fruit drinks and cider. It’s not worth as much as the good apples of course, so you get paid less to do it. At least you don’t need to be careful or bother looking at the apples – you just strip the tree!
When you are picking you have to wear a picker’s bucket – it’s something like a backpack only in front of you. You fill up the bucket (with 25kg of apples!) and then put the apples into a huge wooden apple bin. Once the bin is full there is over 600kg of apples in it. It doesn’t really look that big, but in 9 hours I didn’t even finish two bins. Not much money at all when you only get $20 per juice bin!
(update 17:45)
Finished for today – the outcome is one more apple bin, I’m dirty and I have aching shoulders. Money has to be discussed, at the moment it doesn’t look very good. On Monday I will speak with the manager, let’s see what he’s going to say.