Apples and the story so far...

This post is just so you guys know how much hard work picking apples is. We wake up everyday at roughly 6 am, give or take a few snoozes, depending on the day. We get down to the packing shed, which is all of 20 metres or so away. Tom and Lauren get a lift with Dave the farmer, and I jump on my tractor and cruise over at about 25km's an hour to where they are already starting to pick the bags. A bag when full will way about 12kg or so. It takes about 22 to 24 bags to fill a bin. The tractor trailer takes 3 bins, each taking between an hour to an hour and a half to fill - times this by 3 and your looking at finishing your first trailer at about 10 or 11.We don't normally finish until about 4 or 5 everyday. Obviously we all pick at different speeds, so for every trailer I take 1.25 bins, Tom takes 1, and Lauren takes 0.75. Most of the trees on the farm require ladders to pick the top apples. Ladders are another effort. Tom and I have steel ladders, which are heavy but really easy to set up. Lauren uses a aluminium ladder, which is a little more difficult to setup but is very light. Dave and two other guys use wooden ladders. These I think are hell to use. They bend, wobble, moan and groan, every time you breathe or anything slightly more severe than that. Next, to the apples themselves - the stars of the show you could say. The hardest apples to pick are golden delicious, as they bruise really easy, and every apple has to be wrestled off the tree which becomes really frustrating. Not to mention most of the trees are anywhere from 60 to 100 years old, which means they are really brittle and generally require at least three ladder moves, taking even more time. However, the apples are really big so they fill your bag fairly quickly. Golden delicious are meant to be eaten golden, not green. We are all used to eating under ripe apples because the supermarkets are more bothered about how they look on the shelf than the taste, which is what should really concern us all! Red delicous come away from the tree far more easily, and because they're all fairly young trees you can get to the majority of them by bending the branch and picking them off with one hand. They are harder apples so they take a bit more abuse before they bruise. As you may have guessed by now, it's not easy work by a longshot. That's before factoring in the weather or whether you can be bothered to pick.