Days 107 & 108: Strawberry Planting

I got a call earlier this week about a job that I'd applied for last week: strawberry planting.  They asked me if I was available on Wednesday for some planting.  I was told to show up at the fields at 7am.  So that's what I did this morning.  I packed myself a lunch last night and some warm clothes and some water and sunscreen.  The fields are pretty close to my house so it doesn't take me long to drive there.  I arrived at about 7 and stood in a line to get my employee number and clock in.  The time clock has a keypad on top which you punch your employee number into.  My number is 1748.  Then you open a little door on the side of the time clock and put your right hand in and make all of your fingers touch the pegs.  On the top of the machine there's a little picture of a hand with lights at the fingertips so you can tell if you need to adjust your hand placement. You move your hand around until all the lights go off.  It all seems really high tech, because once you get your hand set up properly the machine says "ID verified" and off you go.  I highly doubt that this machine is reading your fingerprints or something as advanced as all that, because it is attached to the side of a shed in the middle of a strawberry field, with mud and dirt and peeling paint all around.  If anything the only thing that the machine verifies is that you do indeed, have a hand.

So once that is sorted and you are all signed in and it's been confirmed that you do have a hand, you get a sheet of labels from the office with your employee number on it and you get a strawberry planting tool, called a knife, and off you go.  The knife is a thin, blunt rectangular piece of metal attached to a handle.  It is used to shove the roots of the strawberry plant into the ground.

After a short walk to the field, you are given a row to plant.  The rows are raised beds, with black plastic over them.  A series of offset holes has been punched in the plastic, four across.  You stick your employee label to the plastic at the end of the row and plant one strawberry plant into each hole and work your way down one side of the row, then turn around and come back up the other side.  The strawberry plants come in crates and are delivered by tractors.  It pays to grab a bunch of crates of plants to start off with because there aren't enough in one crate to finish the row, and if you wait to get them later, it just means a long walk as the tractors drop the crates off spread out along the rows so the ones nearest to you are likely to be used up by other people planting next to you.  I found the best method for planting is to dump a bunch of plants out of the crate and carry it farther down the row.  Then I work my way back to the crate, pushing the plants along the plastic and planting them as I go.  After a very short while you can get pretty fast at planting.  You lay the roots of the plant across the hole and stab it down into the earth with the knife.  If you do everything right it only takes one stab to get all of the roots into the ground.  If not, you may need to stab again, which slows you down.

When I arrived for my first day of planting, I met a guy named Parminder.  It was his first day as well.  He asked me if he could keep his lunch in my car, since he'd gotten dropped off for work.  I said sure, and most of the day we worked on adjacent rows and chatted a bit.  I got to know him a bit better on the second day, too.  He is from Punjab, in India, and he speaks Hindi as well as English.  He has only been in New Zealand for about a month.  In India he used to work on the stock market, and he hopes to get back into that in New Zealand, eventually. 

The planting day passes fairly quickly - it's mindless work and you can get into a pretty good rhythm, broken only by a 15 minute break at 10am, another one at 2pm and 30 minutes for lunch at noon.  This leaves planty of time for contemplating life and the world and other deep thoughts.  We worked from 7am until 4pm, and they work in all kinds of weather, rain or shine.  It's hard on the legs, though.  After the first day I was so sore.  It hurt to bend down for any reason.  After the second day it was even worse.  It has taken a couple of days to be able to move without pain.  I wonder if it will be bad again if I go back and plant more next week?

On my second day as an agricultural worker I had to finish a line of plants that I'd left the day before.  That was terrible because as soon as the workers are finished they turn on the sprinklers and water the plants.  Right after they are planted they look pretty terrible - all wilted and withered.  But once they get some water on them they revive a bit and I feel much better about their chances for survival.  But all that watering on my partial row from the day before made the ground very sticky with this terrible, clayey mud.  It clings to your feet and builds up unnaturally off of them.  Your feet become very heavy and difficult to move, and because the ground is wet you don't want to sit down to plant.  The mud is so annoying that I saw one person planting in his socks!  I frequently used my knife to scrape mud off my feet, but it was impossible to get it all off and it would very quickly build up again.

Strawberry planting was an interesting experience.  It's not difficult work, although it is physically demanding and so tough on the legs, but if I do more of it I may be able to get used to that.  I actually enjoyed the satisfaction of finishing a row (which took anywhere between 2 and 4 hours, depending on how long the rows are.)  It is pretty cool to see a whole field transformed from black to green.  But the hardest part by far was the physical exhaustion and stiffness.  I met a few people who are agricultural workers and follow the work around the country.  I am certainly glad that I don't have to do that but that I have other options for work.  It was also interesting to be one of only a few white people doing the planting.  Most were Pacific Islanders or Indians.  It can be a challenge to see myself as one of them.  I mean, we're both doing the same job, but again I'm thankful to my education and other resources that I don't have to do that work to survive.  I can see how it would be pretty depressing not to have options beyond unskilled labor.