Late in the season

The season is slowing up now, the pears, plums and peaches are all picked and in long term cold storage or on their way to cans, supermarket shelves, or in shipping containers heading for distant shores. Most of the pickers have left, either on their own accord or sacked by a philistine of a supervisor. This leaves just the apples to pick, which require fewer workers, so we're now in a world of Granny Smiths, which will be followed by Pink Ladies, Sundowners and a few Lady Williams and Rosy Glows. After an unseasonable March heatwave, the weather has turned cool and autumnal. Jen and I will visit New Zealand for a week at the end of the month, then return to Shepparton to see the season out.

The happy worker

It's not good to have your mobile phone sitting in an empty bin, then filling said bin with pears! It wasn't me, making it much easier to see the funny side of it.

A few picking piccies, peaches and plums

I've just finished 31 days straight, no day off until today. The Williams pears are finished, plums and peaches are ongoing, and Packham pears are due to start tomorrow. The weather has been mercifully cool this year, and it's turned out to be a bumper season, branches are breaking under the weight of all the fruit........ I'll try to get some picking pictures uploaded next time I get into town.......

At the Chinese doctor

Last days in Taiwan, for now

a hot day (celsius)

It's been a while

This is the first time I've made it into the town of Shepparton since my last post. Everytime I venture into "Shepp" I'm struck by the number of obese people living here. There's been more than enough work to keep me away from them out on the Orchard. Last time I wrote we were thinning apricots, these have since been harvested over the Christmas/New Year period, with some rain mid-harvest causing many of them to split their sides, rendering them suitable only for jam rather than canning. Since then I've been thinning apples and helping run out trellis wire on a new orchard. Also done a couple of days picking some early pears called Clapps as well as a bit o work in the packing shed. The real business however is about to begin, with the main crop of pears (biginning with "Williams") and peaches ("204's") about to reach maturity. The backpackers and itinerent workers are aleady arriving in town in search of work.

Back on the farm

Well it's been a couple of weeks since I arrived back in Australia and made my way to the ol' orchards again. I didn't waste any time and got right down to business, which at the moment is the business of thinning plums, peaches and apples. For those who are wondering what this means, the trees produce bunches of fruits, some of which must be removed to allow space for what remains to grow, and to allow the tree to put it's energies into producing fewer but larger fruit. At the moment the fruit is for the most part all green and pinball sized, and after we have been through the ground is littered with discarded fruit. The flies are particularly numerous this year.

Confucius, Big Cities, Countryside

I've not been posting much of late,that's not to say that not much has been happening, quite the opposite. Jen and I have had some great market/festival events, the chinese classes confused and vexed and taught me alot, it's seems that just as one thing begins to make perfect sense I discover some other incomprehensible triple unrelated meaning for some such pictogramic character or other......... however todays news is that this evening I fly to Sydney, will spend the weekend there before heading to Shepparton in regional Victoria, Australia, for a completlely different sort of cosmic mindshift, yep its goodbye to the megopolis Taipei and hello once again to the leafy apple and pear orchards, time for some deafening quiet and clean air, which if the drought gripping that part of the world doesn't foul the cogs, will be my locale for the next six months or so..........

Taiwanese Aboriginies

Some local aboriginal kids clowning around during one of our market events at the Chiang Kai Shek Memorial Hall.

Fishing at Keelung Harbour

A shot I took of locals fishing amonst the flostam and jetsam at Keelung Harbour, northeastern Taiwan.