Chapter 6 - Working on the Apple Orchard 🍎

Almost half of my time in New Zealand is over. Today marks exactly 87 days since I arrived here and a lot has happened. Melli and I worked on an apple orchard for four weeks and we found a second home in Napier for another four weeks. Napier is one of the most beautiful cities we have seen so far. Our hostel was located right on the east coast and from our six-bed room, we had a great view of the sea. However, swimming was not possible there due to strong currents. Instead, there are many small fire pits where you can have a bonfire on the beach in the evening.

Every morning, our alarm clock rang at 5:30 AM and right at sunrise, we drove to the orchard together with a few other friends from the hostel in a van. From Monday to Saturday, we worked 9.5 hours every day, returned at 5:30 PM, and went to bed very early accordingly. Since the apple season only starts in late summer, we were mostly responsible for tree care rather than picking the apples. Our tasks varied almost every week. The first few weeks, we worked on the big and older trees. This is called shoot ripping, where we pull out young shoots and branches to give more sunlight to the apples. On other days, we had several jobs to do, including flower thinning, cutting, clipping, and weeding. We worked on the young trees, had to cut off blossoms and branches, clip them to their support, and weed. The worst part was installing the irrigation, which is comparable to doing 500 squats a day.

But the coolest thing for us was the platform. There were usually four of us, without a supervisor, and we could talk and have fun at work. The platform is a vehicle that can drive up to 12 meters high to reach the blossoms and apples at the top. The work on the orchard was sometimes very exhausting or monotonous, but we still experienced many things and met wonderful people. And every evening when we "came home," we told our friends on other orchards about our day, had a beer together, or did something together on our day off. In four weeks, we met a lot of people and found wonderful friends, but above all, no apple tree in Germany will wither on us so quickly!