Plans can come together quickly sometimes. We have arranged a job picking navel oranges in an out of the way place called Goodnight, New South Wales, on the banks of the Murray river up the road from Tooleybuc. It's pretty isolated, we picked there five years ago, there was no cellphone reception, dirt roads, bad water. The job starts in early june so we've decided to head over to New Zealand for a week before it starts. Trans-Tasman flights are a bargain at the moment, even when booked at short notice.

The apple season is OVER!

The last apple was picked yesterday. So what now? Jen and I plan to pack up the car and head northwest, following the Murray river downstream. It's lined with citrus orchards and vinyards, all pumping water from damaged and depleted Murray. We hope to find work there, either picking oranges or pruning grapevines. First I think we'll rest for a few days.
I'll let you know how we get on.....

Hail damage on "rosy glow" apples, Lemnos, Shepparton

Went out to the patch with Bundaberg Bill to see whether or not it would be worth select picking the undamaged fruit, but with 90% of the crop damaged, the whole lot is destined to become baby food.
This fellow took a double hit - sunburnt in the summer heatwave, peppered by hail in the autumn - poor bugger never stood a chance.....

Hail - the orchardist's nightmare

The fruit picking season is winding up, with late apples (late Granny Smith, Pink Lady, Sundowner, Rosy Glow) there is probably another three or four weeks left, but inkeeping with a chaotic season of farm takeovers, extreme heat, bushfires, Chinese and Iraqi contracted workers, we had another weather event on saturday night - large hailstones. Needless to say, hail and ripe apples on trees don't go to well together. Picking has been suspended today while the situation is assessed. Hail storms are very selective, they tend to lay waste in a narrow band, one farm can be devastated, while the neighbour's in unscathed. Unfortunately our farm was "scathed". There will be three options, either the hail damaged fruit will be picked seperately for juice, the good fruit will be picked with damaged fruit left on the trees, or the entire crop will be picked for processing into baby food or juice.

Toilet Admission Ticket - Price: 3 Crowns

Tractor pulling - old school

A day at the Waaia Tractor pull

A sport for farmers with time and money on their side. Popular in the Netherlands apparently.

Heatwave Damage, Extreme picking

Granny Smith apples burnt by the summer heatwave........ the pear picking has ended, and what a season it was, the heat was unbelievable, in the eleven seasons I've done here it was really something else. Jenny and I resorted to a style of picking I had until now thought a little extreme, only for "hungry" pickers. To beat the heat we purchased "miners" lamps, worn on the head, and began our picking day an hour and a half before first light, thus despite having to retire early for the day due to heat stress we still picked our usual number of bins. The funny thing is we actually enjoyed it, and when the weather finally cooled down we continued the practice. Picking pears under the stars in peace and quiet........ now the burnt apples have begun, which can't be picked unless dry, and these autumn mornings can be dewy, so we start work at gentlemens' hours these days......

Fruit and Fire

The weather has been incredably hot. There were five consecutive days with maximum temperatures in excess of 40 degrees celcius. Then there was a cool change one day and it only got to 39 celcius. The contract pickers which were going to be Malaysian but turned out to be Chinese and Iraqi, as well as the handful of regular pickers including Jen and I, couldn't pick much past noon, when the heat became overpowering. Fruit was cooking on the trees. The trees were shutting down in the heat which stopped the fruit growing and has made problems with undersized fruit. Then a weather forcast a couple of days before saturday february 7 came out saying that the saturday would bring high winds and high temperatures in the mid 40's, raising the risk of possable bushfires in the tinder dry eucalypt bushland and fully cured grasslands of victoria. We were given the day off work. The day broke many records, Melbourne recorded it's hottest day on record at 46.4 degrees celcius (115.5 Farenheit). Here in Shepparton I saw thermometers reading 47 and 48 degrees. The fears of fire became a reality, and they have been widely reported elsewhere. It is the worst natural disaster in Australia since european settlement. The nearest fires to where we are were perhaps 100km away, and we were never in any danger here, there has just been alot of smoke turning the sun and moon red. There are still fires burning and it is a very sombre time here in Victoria at present.

2009 Victorian Bushfires
2009 Southeastern Australian Heatwave

things have taken a turn

There have been some developments down on the farm. There is a heatwave here, and in all of Victoria including Melbourne, four - perhaps five consecutive days are forcast to be over forty degrees celcius. This has affected the growth of the fruit. Warm nights help growth but extreme heat during the daytime shuts the trees down. It also gives the apples sunburn making them unsalable. The pear trees have a fantastic crop but it is mostly a very small size.
A bigger and more worrying development though, the farm I've worked the fruit season on each year for the past ten has merged with a larger company -"merged" was the word first circulated but as the days pass "takeover" might be closer to the truth, at least insofar as the running of the farm goes. The pickers quarters on the orchard here are by this time of year full, the lawn has tents scattered about, and I'm meeting people from Oz, Nz, Germany, France, Finland, UK, Japan, Korea and a handful of other nationalities. This year the place is all but deserted. The new "entity" will be using contract labour to do the picking, that is to say one person, a third party "contractor" will bring in a load of pickers who work for him to do the harvesting. The farmer pays him, he takes a cut from each bin picked and then pays the pickers. Most contractors are just parasites who make a sugarbag o' money through other peoples hard work. It seems this contractor will be bringing a load of Malaysians to do the picking. We will probably have no picking job here after this season, and the farm owner has said as much, though at least he has offered to find us a spot on another farm if we want.

Harvest report

The heat is on now, we've already had a couple of days (including today) into the low 40's celcius. The apricots are finished, peaches and pears are just beginning, but the heat is making life uncomfortable, especially being out under the sun all day.

Taiwanese tucker

The week before Christmas

It's been a strange summer in Shepparton, hardly a day over 30 C so far, when normally we would have already hit the 40 C mark more than once alrealy, and the wind had been blowing alot making the past month seem more like a South Island summer than a northern Victorian one. There has been rain at least once a week, also very unusual for this time of year, it's great for the apples and pears but has caused big problems with cherries and early apricots, rain at harvest time causes the fruit to split, the cherries become unsaleable and the apricots only good for jam.

Little to say

Not much to report. Working on the main farm monday to friday, a different farm saturday and sunday. Been thinning peaches, apples, plums, and repairing irrigation sprinklers. That's about it at the moment.

Adult Engrish/Chinglish site

Well worth a look.......

http://adult.engrish.com/

Australia

Xu Xu is back in the land of Oz. I arrived back to my apartment on the orchard, the front door unopened since I was last there in early june. I was greeted by the daddy long legs spiders which had woven their webs throughout the three rooms, covering me as I enter. There are also numerous black house spiders, which I always take as a good sign as meaning there are no poisonous white tail spiders in the rooms. This could just be some class of urban myth but it is known that the black house spider is the favourite prey of the white tail. The flyscreen edges are the favourite dwelling places of the mean looking black house spiders, which keep to themselves and I like to have around, as they are very adept at catching any flies that manage to get inside. Sometimes I catch a fly or two and throw them into a web and watch spidey come out and grab it. There are soooo many flies outside, which is par for the course in these parts.
Work - currently I'm busy thinning peaches, which will be finished this week and followed by some apple thinning before the first harvesting of the season begins in a couple of weeks with apricots.
The crop is looking good this year with the exception of the plums which are disappointing.

Chinglish part eleventy nine

Thanks again to engrish.com

Last post from Taiwan ..... for now

This will be my last post from Taiwan for some time. Tomorrow I fly to Australia to work in the fruit orchards of northern Victoria's Goulburn Valley.
I leave just as ex president Chen has been arrested and detained pending charges of graft, bribery, forgery, money laundering and illegal possesion of state assets. He is also one of the few world leaders with the guts to stand up to the Chinese communist party and it's goverment. His arrest is making news around the world, and depending on the editorial stance of various news outlets he is either a crook or one of the few world leaders with the balls to stand up to the Chinese. Which is he? He is both.
The Taiwanese judicial system will deal with him, fairly or otherwise, but to many he will always be the hero of Taiwanese independence.
I believe that that the Taiwanese government is correct in choosing to engage with the mainland government in dialogue, but I also believe that Taiwan is, and must be recognised by the rest of the world as, an independent nation, providing that that is the will of the Taiwanese people.
As for me, my posts will likely become slightly less frequent, as I will have more limited internet access, and will be busy with work, but I'll do my best to post regularly. I'm yet to replace my stolen camera, the crazy exchange rate fluctuations of the currencies I use mean that it is cheaper for me to buy the camera I want in Australia rather than in Taiwan.
So it's goodbye Taiwan, for now anyway.

Taitung, Chenggong, Hualien - 台東 成功 花蓮市

Man it was good to get outta the rat race of Taipei! Even though this weekend I'll be back in the boondocks working again among the trees of the Zurcas orchards in rural Victoria, I wanted to head down Taiwan's rugged and relatively sparsely populated east coast. I took a train from Taipei Main Station, following the coastline down to Hualien then heading inland passing through the Eastern Rift Valley, a land of tropical fruit orchards and rice fields. Stunning scenery. I arrived in Taitung (pronounced Taidong) to discover that the hostel I was planning to stay at had shut down, so after wandering about for a while I checked into a cheap but clean and friendly hotel for three days. Taitung is a very laid back coastal town, the beach is clean but rips make it unsafe for swimming. There is an airforce base just out of town and military jets often fly low and slow over the town on their approach to the runway. I spent alot of time on the beach and in a coastal forest park with shady paths, birdwatching huts, a butterfly reserve and rowing lake. One evening around dusk while sitting close to the surf upon one of the many great ugly concrete wave breakers placed here and there along the foreshore I saw a waterspout for the first time. A great tornado of black cloud perhaps a kilometre offshore lifting water from the oceans surface. Wow. Leaving Taitung suitably relaxed and less pale skinned than when I arrived I caught a local bus up to the fishing port of Chenggong, the town itself is nothing special but the port with it's large and small fishing boats coming and going was a fine sight. The harbour itself is protected by large concrete walls in the ocean - neccesary protection from the frequent summer typhoons. I was lucky to be there for the auctioning of the days catch. I saw swordfish, yellowfin tuna, barracutta, and perhaps two dozen other sorts of fish which I have no idea the names of, black, blue, silver, orange and even a few stripey ones. It was a real treat. Saw some hard as nails fisher men and women too, harder than nails I reckon. Even the women chew betelnut in these parts. They didn't pay much attention to me though, they were just busy getting on with their tasks. I saw a couple of really cheap looking hotels in Chenggong, but they didn't look too inviting so I continued up the coast by bus to Hualien, the largest city on the east coast. I had the large comfortable bus to myself for half the journey, and was joined by another passenger who bummed a Yuan(NT$) from me for the rest. Oh, there were a dozen or so aboriginal junior high school students who got on at one small town and who got off at various spots in the next, the whole time engaging in lively banter with the driver. The east coast is home to many of Taiwan's aboriginals of which there are nine tribes. There is evidence that suggests they are related to New Zealand Maori. They certainly look the same. The coastal road offers some stunning scenery, and traffic during weekdays is sparse, it reminds me of parts of New Zealand's South Island west coast. Spent a night in a hotel in Hualien, where I visited last year, enjoyed it just as much as last time. Perhaps if and when I return to continue my Chinese studies it could be at the university there...... Taipei's charms seem to have worn off for me. At about eleven thirty I recieved a call to my hotel room asking if I needed a massage. What service! The whole time I was away I spoke nothing but Chinese, which was hugely satisfying. I'm now back in Taipei for my last few days in Taiwan - on friday night I catch a plane to Melbourne, Australia......

The American Federal Reserve should be watched very carefully

They are currently engaged in some very dodgy business......