It’s been a very busy week on the farm. Flower cropping peaked this week at around 200,000 bunches picked (10 stems per bunch), carrot harvest is ongoing and we have started back into seeding early crop under plastic and outdoor, all at the same time. Add in a trip to Paris and it was an intense week.

Seeding early crop veg is now complete, a good portion of which is under plastic to encourage early growth and give us the staged maturity that will allow us a consistent size root as we harvest from August on in the coming year. We will plant our crop in three stages over March, April and May.

Flower cropping has peaked and we are now on the run in to the finishing line. We expect to pick somewhere in the region of 750,000 bunches this year when complete. In lay terms, that’s 7.5 million times somebody has to bend down and pick an individual stem over the February to April season.

Most of the pickers on the farm are longterm migrant pickers that travel around Europe following the seasons such as early flowers in Cornwall, oranges in Spain, strawberries in Denmark or late flowers in Scotland. These guys appear every year without the need for any communication etc.

The pickers get paid on piece rate which takes a lot of the stress out of it for us, if they don’t work, they don’t get paid. A good picker will pick anywhere up to 1,500 bunches/day while the bad picker might only pick 250 bunches. We try to clear out the bad pickers and keep good volume into the better pickers, that way we all make more money.

Early start tomorrow to finish off the last of our un-strawed carrots, a relief as the outdoor carrots tend start to re-grow quicker and thus suffer quality issues easier. We hope to finish the strawed stuff over the next two weeks.

Made it to Paris for the game on Saturday, surreal occasion and an incredible weekend. Back to reality with a bang at 5:30am tomorrow morning in field!