Locking Down For Harvest On The Farm

Well, hasn’t it been a crazy few months? 

When you sang Auld Lang Syne in 2019 could you even have guessed what 2020 had in store?

While New Zealand locked down and hospitals geared up, the food industry went into essential service mode. 

Supermarkets did a fantastic job of keeping us fed at the service end. Meanwhile, at the production end, no-one told the plants and animals about Covid 19. They just carried on growing and ripening as usual. 

On our farm alone, we harvested four crops between March and May. 

So, here’s the tale of our lockdown harvest.

The Grain Harvest

Paddock of ripe barley during the lockdown harvest month.
Paddocks full of oats and barley awaited the lockdown harvest.

We own an ageing Massey Ferguson harvester. It’s given sterling service over the past 20 years, gathering grain on our farm and two others as well. Consequently, the grain harvest was in full swing when Jacinda announced that NZ would be locking down. 

Rumours flew that we’d have to sit in our houses and let things rot. That was nonsense, of course. Farmers could carry on so long as we observed all the rules and made everyone safe. 

It was a strange, old time. Gone were my hours in the kitchen, whipping up lunches and snacks galore. Now, everyone brought their own food and ate it separately. The truck and tractor drivers stayed in their cabs and occasionally waved as each passed by. 

It was a lonely old time for our combine driver, too. 

Usually, he has plenty of visitors at harvest time. Grandchildren, nieces and nephews, past and present farmers and the occasional townie all love to man the spare seat in the cab. And Pat enjoys a bit of company cos it’s tedious travelling around and around paddocks of yellow grain.

There were no visitors in 2020. This season, poor Pat was on his own. 

Harvesting The Hops

Hops on the bine
Some of our newest hops ready for harvest.

While grain poured into the silos, the hops were going gangbusters. 

Our plans for the hop harvest festival went out the window. Abandoned, the idea of Woofers and caravans by the woolshed. The good folk at Altitude Brewing shelved plans to create another Garston green-hop brew. 

Instead, our farm’s two little family bubbles were on their own with rows and rows of hops to pick in a race against time.

Last year, we cut all the bines at the same time and carted them to a central location. Music was blaring, and the tables were surrounded by people plucking thousands of hops. 

In the 2020 lockdown, we cut the bines down six at a time. Each afternoon, Terry and I piled two or three onto the back of the Polaris and trundled them up to our house, leaving James and his family to deal with the rest.

It took me about five minutes to decide that standing on a cold, concrete carport for hours by myself was not going to work. So, we lined the lounge carpet with tarps and brought the hop vines inside. 

Afternoon and night, I cut the vines into manageable chunks and piled them on the living room floor. Thank goodness for hot drinks and Sky TV! 

Despite the tarpaulins, hop leaves went everywhere. So did spiders, large and small. Eeek!  

Hop plants filled the lounge with aroma, leaves and spiders.

I vacuumed FREQUENTLY, but tiny creepy-crawlies still crawled out of the sofa and bit me on the arm. 

The hop harvest seemed to go on for days, but suddenly, the flowers were too far gone. It hurt to admit defeat and leave some hops on the bines.

The Saffron Ripens

Ripe red saffron strands emerge from the purple flower.

Hard on the heels of the hops, the saffron’s delicate purple flowers began to poke their heads above the earth. 

Still in our separate bubbles — Terry and I at one end of the paddock and James’ family at the other — we began the saffron harvest. 

With thousands of two-year-old bulbs in the ground, there was no way we could do this one on our own. But, equally, lockdown rules made it hard for Kiwi Saffron owners Jo and Steve Daley to travel or to bring in their usual WWoofers to help. 

Fortunately, there were only a few hundred flowers at first — one or two buckets — each day. They were easy to pick but time-consuming for Lizette and the boys to process in their carefully-cleaned sleepout. It kept them busy each afternoon — an essential for lockdown — but they were more than relieved when Level 3 arrived, bringing with it a bubble of Wwoofers to take over the job. 

They came just in time, for the flowers were multiplying and producing bucket loads every day. Thank goodness there were plenty of Wwoofers who stayed in New Zealand when the borders closed. The saffron harvest would have been ruined without them.

It takes hours to process buckets full of saffron flowers. All you want are those tiny red strands.

Trudging up and down the rows over clumps of uneven soil was hard on my knees, so I retreated when the Wwoofers arrived. But, Terry went out into the paddock every day to pluck “his” end of the saffron rows. What a trooper.

Apples galore

2020 was a bumper year for all the apples too.

The gorgeous apples by the woolshed — best described as “sort of like a Cox’s Orange” — ripened crisp and tart in mid-April. Often these apples are only on the high branches, but this year there were lots within reach. It was fun to pop down with a bucket for apples and sacks for dry pine cones which littered the ground. (Pine cones make the best kindling ever.)

We don’t usually get so many beautiful apples on this particular tree.

There were plenty to pick from our unique, heritage apple tree up the gully too. 

This year I had the time to process and freeze many apples and to carefully wrap others individually in newspaper. I stored them in a crate, and so far, they’ve stayed perfect, so fingers crossed.

When the autumn winds came, as they always do, apples tumbled to the ground. Lizette and her boys rescued cratefuls of these windfalls and sent them up to Laura Douglas at Real Country to feed her pigs. 

Like all tourism businesses, Real Country is devastated by the lockdown, so Laura did appreciate the piggy treats.

As for us, we’ve eaten so much apple crumble that we’re well over that particular dessert now. I really must add more apple recipes to my collection. 

What’s Your Story?

So, that’s our lockdown story. But everyone had a different experience of lockdown, of course. What’s yours? 

I’m hoping to put together a post-lockdown series of stories about how innovative Kiwi businesses are pivoting to survive and thrive.

Contact me now if you know someone who’d like to be featured or share this story to spread the word.

Have You Seen These Lockdown Posts on TOML?

Experiments in the Art and Science of Soap

Party On: Harvest Festival At The Hops

A pile of hops waiting to be picked.

Take 30+ curious beer aficionados and a bumper crop of hops. Throw in a delicious barbeque and a keg of Altitude Brewing’s best thirst-quenching brew. Mix with a dollop of music and you have yourself a recipe for the Garston Hops 2019 Hop-Picking Party.

The Big Hops Harvest Problem:

200 hop vines on two farms —  all of them covered in ripe, cone-shaped flowers. A tiny window of time in which to pick them —  and only two busy farmers both trying to juggle multiple farm jobs. The big hop companies have this process all mechanised, but we’re a tiny outfit, just starting out.

What to do?

Continue reading “Party On: Harvest Festival At The Hops”

Altitude Brewing: The Great Adventure

Many small businesses have a special story to tell. They are built on passion, commitment and a long-held dream. Each has a flavour, history and ethos that is all their own. Some are steeped in history, others are brand-new and excitingly different. Altitude Brewing, who last year took all of our green hops to flavour the delicious “Me and Jimmy McNamee” beer, is one such business with a story to tell.

The other day I popped into their new building on the Frankton Marina, to visit partners Eliott Menzies and Eddie Gapper, and hear the tales behind…

Altitude Brewing.

Altitude Brewing's Motto: Every great adventure ends with a beer!
Continue reading “Altitude Brewing: The Great Adventure”

Hops In A Hurry

All the stars aligned last weekend and suddenly our hop harvest was underway. The flowers weren’t supposed to be ready for another ten days, but the weather gods smiled and the hops ripened fast.

Fortunately, it was Easter and so plenty of people had a day to spare. My plans for a quiet holiday flew out the window. We had to get the hops picked pronto, so the call went out — HELP!

Thank goodness, our family and friends rallied round.  

A Trial Crop

Hops are an interesting crop — and an experimental one for our farm. You see, according to some experts, hops shouldn’t thrive this far south in New Zealand. It’s too cold; too windy; too far down at the bottom of the world. But the experts hadn’t seen the vine Cousin Matt had been quietly nurturing in a sheltered corner of his garden down the road. We knew that one hop plant would grow, but could they grow on a larger scale? We decided to find out.

Hop frames in a tree lined paddock.

It didn’t take us long to identify the perfect hop-growing-spot on our farm. We call it the “Tree Surrounded Paddock.” It’s sheltered from the wind in every direction and flat as a pancake. Add in some beautiful soil and you’ve got a southern paradise for hops. And, two years down the track, the hops seem to agree.

Little boy measuring a hole in the snow.
Even the youngest McNamees joined in when we put up the hop frames.

Hops seedlings start out small, but in just a few months they shoot up four metres or more. Everyone in the family helped to build the frames needed to support such tall plants.

The brewer from Altitude Brewing inspects our towering hop plants.
Eliot Menzies from Altitude Brewing came to help harvest the hops for his Green Hop Beer.

Hops need plenty of water and fertilizer, so we put in a small automatic watering system. Last year the timer worked perfectly. This year it didn’t. We watered them when we could but the drought sucked every drop out of the farm for months. So the hops had to get by on short rations. Just like the rest of us.

It didn’t seem to bother them much. I mean, just look at all the flowers!

Hop plants on the sorting table.

Harvesting Hops

To harvest the flowers we cut the vines at the top and bottom and carted the whole plant to the picking room aka my brother-in-law’s carport.

On a large hop farm with a huge volume of flowers, this is all mechanised but we must pick and sort every flower by hand. With our wonderful friends and family, we set to work. Eddie and Eliot from Altitude Brewing brought some friends along to help. 

Somehow, we got the whole crop done in two days. It’s not hard work, but plucking flower after flower after flower gets rather boring. Unless you’ve got “Me And Bobby McGee,” and “The Gambler” on your iPod.  Fortunately, we had all the classics to get us through: music, conversation and lots of food.

Hop flower split to show yellow resin inside.
Inside a ripe hop flower. The yellow is not pollen, but the resin which provides the distinctive hop flavour.

Hops are one of beer’s four essential ingredients. When the flowers are ripe they develop a distinctive yellow resin. And that’s what flavours the beer. There are many different varieties and they all offer different tastes. Craft brewers spend ages blending hops to create their own unique recipes.
Mostly, the flowers are dried and made into pellets which are easy to store. But our hops are heading straight to Queenstown’s Altitude Brewing. Eliot’s planning a special Garston green-hop brew.
This means time is of the essence because the flowers have to be fresh. There is a very short window of opportunity when making this sort of beer.

In New Zealand, and indeed worldwide, there is a burgeoning interest in craft beer. Homebrewing is on the rise and microbreweries are springing up in all sorts of interesting places.

Nowadays, people are more and more interested in beer as a drink to savour and appreciate. I think it’s all part of the slow living, back to our roots movement that’s happening all over the world.

Beer bottles with sun between them.

We’re aiming to support our local micro-breweries.  Wouldn’t it be great to give them  naturally produced, locally grown hops. Minimal food miles and maximum goodness, that’s the plan. Sounds perfect to me.

Cheers!

More Hop and Beer Stories To Enjoy On The Blog

Altitude Brewing: The Great Adventure

Town and Country: Team Building At Its Best

Party On: Harvest Festival At The Hops