Fruit Galore

Last time I left off I was on my way to my next farm in Roxburgh. That didn’t last too long. I didn’t like it. So now I’m on the road again! Right now I’m blogging from a hostel in queenstown… Buts let’s rewind to the farm in Roxburgh…

The last farm I was on was a huge sprawling orchard with cherries, apricots and many, many, many more fruits and veggies. The only problem was that the fruit was just starting to grow, so I couldn’t eat any of it. Actually for being a fruit orchard the farm didn’t have any fruit at all, which was disappointing and annoying.

It didn’t take too long for me to realize that I didn’t like this farm. The host was crazy, work boring, accommodation limited and food sparse.  

The name of the host was Dave, and he was just a rotten guy. On three separate occasions he told me to pack my bags and get off his farm, when I had done absolutely nothing wrong. After a while I started to feel very uncomfortable around him and avoided him the best I could. It was at that point that I decided it was time to leave.

At this farm I realized that I have no patience dealing with tediously repetitive jobs. In this case it was fruit thinning on apricot trees. Every apricot tree grows lots of fruit very closely packed together. You may think, oh that’s good, more money for the farmer. Wrong. If he left the trees to grow normally the fruit would push on each other ruining most of it. Our job was to pick off most of the immature fruit to give enough space for the apricots to grow.

A branch would start like this:

And end like this:

Do this for 28-30 hours a week. I was honestly ready to shoot myself. No lie.

When I slept I felt like I was in a jail cell.

Sometimes our host would just disappear and not show up again till the next day leaving the group of 

us to cook dinner from whatever we could find. So sometimes it was just toast for dinner!

Now that I’ve properly vented let me describe the things I DID like about this farm.

The people. This farm had a lot of wwoofers like myself. At one point there were 31 of us, from France, Germany, USA, Ireland, Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, Canada and New Zealand.  Of those, about 90% were either from France or Germany. This abundance of people made it easy to made friends, play cards and just be social. I actually became really good friends with a guy my age named Jonasch. He was a German who had a really similar sense of human. We would always work out in the fields together and hang out after work and at night.

Another great thing about the farm was the free wifi. Wifi, or internet in general is tough and expensive  

come by. If I had to rank the top things I spend money on it would be, food, alcohol J, hostels and internet. So the fact that this farm had unlimited free wifi was fantastic. I was able to torrent a lot of the TV shows I was missing and skype family.

The final good thing was dinner. When the host was present at dinner time he would made really delicious big dinners. I had Asian, French, Spanish and American food, as well as many others. After a hard day at work it was a welcomed relief.

I only stayed there for a week and a half before leaving for Queenstown, where I am currently staying. Look out for another blog post soon about my Queenstown adventures!

Cheers