Raspberries
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“Raspberries are our most important fruit. Without a good raspberry harvest, we could go bankrupt.” I remember our boss, Vincent, telling us this as we were about to start our first day of work on our working holiday on a farm in France.
“Your first job,” he told us, pointing to one of the two fields full of raspberry plants, “is to cut all the raspberry canes in this field down to ground level, new canes will grow from the plant, and they produce more fruit than if I just left the old canes to fruit again.”
We did as we were told, and at the end of the day, as we were finishing cutting the raspberries canes in the field, Vincent came over to see how we had done. Whilst we were chatting he suddenly slapped his hand against his forehead. “I don’t believe it,” he said, shaking his head, “I’ve made a mistake, I made you cut all the raspberry canes down, but these raspberries only produce fruit when the canes have been growing for a year, I should have made you leave the older canes, because we won’t get any fruit from the new canes this year.”
“There are loads of plants that have grown wild next to the field, we’ve not cut them down at all, could you just transplant those?” I asked.
“Yes, we could transplant them into this field,” said Vincent, looked relieved, “I think there are enough, it’s just a shame you’ve wasted all your time. We’ll start work on that tomorrow morning. Lets go in for dinner now, and a well earned glass of cider.”
The next day we transplanted the raspberries that had grown wild into his field. We had finished by lunchtime and Vincent was pleased with our work. The day after that we were working on the second raspberry field. Our job was to transplant raspberry plants from where they were too close together to places where there were large gaps in the rows. At lunchtime, Vincent came down to see us.
He told us that all the plants that we replanted yesterday had died. “I meant to water them yesterday,” he explained, “but I completely forgot about them after all those ciders. I went to water them just now but they’d all wilted, I don’t think any will survive. Unless some more magically appear from somewhere, it doesn’t look like we’ll have many raspberries this year.”
Vincent did seem to be learning from his mistakes though. “This time,” he told us, “I’ll set up a sprinkler system for the rows that you’ve been doing this morning so they’ll definitely have enough water.”
We weren’t working that afternoon, or the next morning, so we spent the night camping in the mountains, and we didn’t get back to the farm until the afternoon on the next day. The first thing we did was go to see how the raspberries we’d replanted had done.
As we half expected, they were all dead. We went to tell Vincent, who was fixing the gate at the entrance to the farm. “Oh no, not again.” he cried. “Yesterday I disconnected the hose for the sprinkler system so that I could water the plants in the greenhouse. I must have forgotten to reconnect it. What am I going to do? Unless some more magically appear from somewhere, we’re hardly going to have any raspberries this year, or next year. We’re going to be ruined. My wife’s going to kill me.”
“Hello,” someone shouted. We all looked round to see that Vincent’s neighbour, who was also a farmer, was calling him from the drive. “I’ve finally got around to neatening up my fields, I’ve spent all day pulling up plants. I started a fire and was just going to burn them when I thought that you might want them.”
“What plants do you have?” asked Vincent.
“There are apple trees, rhubarb plants, and blackberry bushes if you want them,” Vincent's neighbour replied.
“I’ll come and have a look, we can probably use some of them.” Vincent didn’t seem too interested. He was obviously more worried about his failed raspberry crop.
“Help me take those bags down to the fire, and then I’ll show you what plants I have.” said Vincent’s neighbour pointing to a dozen large white sacks sitting at the end of Vincent’s drive. We all went over to help him with the sacks. “It’s a shame that we have to burn these, but I just don’t have room for them and I know you have hundreds already.
“What are they?” I asked.
“Raspberries of course, the fields were a mess, I had to pull up hundreds of them, all varieties and all ages, I just don’t have room to keep them.”
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