Fruit picking in Australia - Tabulam

After spending several hours on the internet, we found some interesting jobs. Finally, a few days later, we started working at the Blue Mountain Farm in Tabulam. We live relatively close by in a hostel/campsite for $105 per person per week.

It takes us about 15 minutes to get to work, partly because the speed limit on the farm is 10 km/h, otherwise you'll kick up a nice dust cloud 🚘🚘
On the first day, we started at 7am, although that's more of a guideline than a fixed starting time. In general, you can decide every day whether you want to work or not. The finishing time is also up to you.
When we arrived at the farm, there were still some frozen kangaroos in the field. I guess they didn't expect someone to come so early.

When we reached the end of the farm, we were briefly explained the difference between a good blueberry and a bad one, and then we strapped on belts with buckets and started picking.

On the first day, we harvested a total of eight buckets in 7 hours. By now, we have been able to average around ten buckets in 5 hours.

Others manage to harvest twice as much in the same time, but we're still not sure how they do it. Either the pickers have eight arms, or there are already prepared buckets hanging in the bushes that they have to find and hand in directly... After picking, you have to check the blueberries because occasionally a bad one can end up in the bucket - after all, you don't pick each berry individually. During the check or even before, the berries are sorted into a new crate.

The price is then calculated at the end of the day and usually announced the next day. Currently, the price per kilo is between $4.50 and $6 💸.

One bucket can hold about 2kg, so you get around $10 per bucket. Sometimes a crate gets lost, which is a stroke of luck because in that case, you are credited with a crate weighing 2.2kg. So, we hope to lose a few crates every day.

After work, we relax in the common room/kitchen/dining room - the TV is on all the time and there is a wide selection of movies. In the evenings, we like to play a round of poker or a game of chess with the French. ♜♝ or several games.

Yesterday, we played for money, so everyone put in two dollars and the winner gets it all. So, there were $10 in the pot, which I won. Yippie. 🎉

During our first week here, a Swedish girl raised a little bird that had fallen out of its nest. She fed it mealworms, taught it to fly, and it sat on her shoulder most of the time - unless someone else carried it on their finger and petted it. She even took it to work once, which was no problem because it always came back to her.
At the end of the week, it was so well taken care of that it set itself free, or at least it hasn't been seen anymore..

Occasionally, we also have to take care of our physical well-being, so we take a one-hour drive to the town of Casino, 60km away - The beef capital, as it says on the town sign. Here, there are Aldi, Coles, expensive gas stations, and a few extremely expensive bottle shops - alcohol is very rarely available in regular supermarkets and if so, usually in a separate section ('Liquorland' in Coles, for example, not every Coles has a Liquorland).

Another highlight of our stay here was a snake at the campsite 🐍🐍 It was hiding by the garbage at the edge of the site, some backpackers leave their tents behind (for whatever reason) and Brenton, the 'hostel father', has to clean them up. Anyway, I had just returned from our pitch when he asked if I was scared of snakes and showed me a snake making its way to the neighboring property. He said it was a Brown Snake, the most common venomous snake in Australia.
Our Dutch employee Rudi - tall, blond, bearded, and blue-eyed - said, however (even though he didn't see the snake and only heard my description), that it probably wasn't a Brown Snake.

We have the weekend off, the last one before Christmas. We thought about going to Byron Bay, which is about 120km away, to go swimming, but there is always plenty to do and after eight days of work, you deserve to relax.
So, we'll go shopping, tidy up the car, and play games and read on our phones.