Still smiling despite the muddy harvest

The pick must go on: “I’d be buggered without them,” Blue Willow Citrus orchard Murray Burgess says of the mandarin pickers who are harvesting the fruit in ankle-deep, thick mud at the flood-hit Te Karaka property. Mr Burgess is proud of his workers who are turning up every morning to pick the fruit in hard conditions. “I really appreciate their hard work,” he says. The ground is carpeted in thick, gooey mud but the fruit were spared. “People who buy mandarins from the shop should know the hard work people go through to get them there.” Mr Burgess is pictured with supervisor Geraldine Crawford, quality controller Doi Crawford and Basil the dog. Picture by Liam Clayton

Gumboot-sucking, shin-deep, gluey mud is what mandarin pickers are working in after flooding hit Murray and Wendy Burgess’s Blue Willow Citrus orchard at Te Karaka, and Mr Burgess could not be more proud of his workers.

“This is it, our yearly income,” he said. “To have a flood at the beginning of the mandarin harvest is heart-breaking.

“But I’m proud of my workers. There are 15 of them, all local. I really appreciate their hard work. They deserve a bit of recognition. I’d be buggered without them.”

The mandarin harvest is usually shorts and singlets work, said Mr Burgess.

Not this year. The flood breached the riverbank about 100 metres from the orchard and the water was deep enough to engulf the fruiting trees up to the leaf canopy.

“A hundred millimetres of rain on top of all of this stuff didn’t help either,” said Mr Burgess.

The crop was spared, but the pickers have only a short time-frame to harvest the fruit. They turned up yesterday morning to work in frosty, wet, muddy conditions before the sun warmed them a little.

“They’re still laughing in the mandarin rows, though,” said Mrs Burgess.

The mud was not too bad on Thursday but by yesterday it had gone soft and gluey.

“When you lift your feet you feel the stickiness,” said mandarin picker Trixie Walker. “One lady pulled her foot up and her gumboot was still stuck in the mud.”

To deal with mud, Mr Burgess said it was a case of putting the blinkers on for now.

“We’ll fix it up in the springtime. If I get a kick up the arse like this every 13 years, I can live with that,” he said as recalled the flood of 2005. But I feel for those poor buggers who lose everything.”