Kiwi Bud Thinning

First day of work was a torture to us. We are city girls and boy who used to work in the office and never had the experience to work in an orchard. We were taught by "head wind S"'s assistant on how to pick the kiwi buds. "Head wind S"'s assistant, who we called him 奸人坚, is another lan xi people who sides his boss. The way he talked make us feel like we are like 砧板上的鱼肉, we can't make our own decision, what we can only do is to follow their insturctions on what time to work, how's the working hour, etc.

We were brought to a kiwi orchard where 奸人坚 taught us how to differentitate the unwanted kiwi bud with the nice bud. Kiwifruit is grown on vines which are supported by overhead pergolas that are approximately 2 metres high. The work is very physical as you have your hands in the air and your neck back for the majority of tasks performed. With the work being outside, this orchard work is weather dependent, meaning we do not work in wet weather. This is because if we pluck the kiwi bud when the weather is wet, the opening of the bud will be very fragile to the viruses brought by the wind. Hence, this is what we say as our job is to 看天吃饭。

kiwi tree

After briefing by 奸人坚，we started our bud thinning job. The aim of bud thinning is to reduce the number of buds prior to pollination by removing side buds and flat buds. This is because if the fruit is overcrowded, it will cause damage because each fruit couldn't get enough nutrients to grow into the desired size. Hence, we have to be extremely wary to the buds above our head, scanned them cautiously to find the three-buds or the flat buds, which looks like a kidney bean. Also, we can only pick the bud from a female tree. At first, we have some problem to differentiate between the male and female tree as they tangle around, making our eyesight blur O_O

The perfect bud

The three-buds, which we have to eliminate the two side buds

Three-buds

The kidney-bean-bud

Can you differentiate between the normal bud and the distorted bud?

First day, we finish work at 4pm. This was the most tiring moment for us, as after 8 hours of working, we can feel that our neck, shoulder, back bone, leg, is ACHING terribly!!! My neck is awfully pain, as I'm too short and it is quite suffering for me to turn up my neck all the time. Furthermore, they are monitoring our speed of work, and I'm the slowest among four of us. My height makes me difficult to reach the bud. Corey had bought a second hand steel shoes, to ease her work. After wearing the steel shoes, she felt much more better to continue work.

The 6-inch tall steel shoes which is specialized for working in kiwi orchard

Whereas for me, I continue to add in another 2 pairs of slippers under my canvass shoes to increase more height. Four of us were feeling down as this is really a tiring job. Since we are working in the orchard, we have to prepare our lunch box a day before as there's no restaurant nearby. Therefore, we have to eat cold lunch everyday. Worst to worst, not every orchard has toilet!!! This is really inconvenient to us, especially girls. We were moody and yet nothing we could do as we need to work to earn our living costs here. We were looking forward that things will be better after that.