THE Prepping thread - a new beginning :)

GreyQueen

:) Afternoon all, back in Shoebox Towers after a few days at the parental homestead. Did very little (some mending) and ate lots. Read a couple of books including Laurie Lee's I walked out one midsummer morning, which is dangerously close to a classic.

Re harvesting, it's been 50 odd years since there was much manual labour involved in potato harvesting, it's mainly by machine. And a damned good job, too, brutal job. Round here, the only places where strawbs are grown in the ground are a few PYO farms. Proper farms have them up on trestles in the polytunnels. As I've picked strawbs and rasps for a living (and biked ten miles each way to get to and fro the farms), I feel I'm qualified to comment. It's hard work but should be perfectly do-able by the able-bodied esp the under-40s.

Mine is the first generation in our family off the land in a rural area, and myself and my cousins have only done fruit & veg picking as casuals as teens, and gardening on our own account. Our Dads (and Mums) and grands and great-grands were peasants back to the dawn on history.

Around here, seasonal labour in the fields was provided by men on overtime from farm jobs, especially single-ing sugar beet (a job no longer needed due to developments in beet seeds). There was also a large body of working-class people called 'housewives' who used to work the fruit and the veggies, plus the gypsies did a lot of it.

Nowadays, the housewife is a rare sight, as most who need to work need to work all the time, and one could hardly imagine the ladies-who-lunch section climbing into wellies and heading out for the fields.

Bearing in mind that the changes in demographics happened at least a generation before the influx of affordable EU labour, I would be interested to know from any farming folk present who was harvesting their veggies between say the mid-seventies and 2004?

[Deleted User]

We're good old fashioned peasants too GQ. My mum hop picked every year I can remember when I was young and apple picked too as we lived in mid Kent. I hop picked when I was old enough and schooling allowed sometimes going for a couple of hours direct from the school bus home and apple picked, and cherry picked and plum picked, I've done pears, damsons, tayberries, strawberries too all of which were pretty hard graft and dirty work. Hands at the end of the picking day are ingrained with dirt and sore as heck! The pay wasn't good but if you wanted the money the work was always there if you put in the effort, if you didn't the manager got shot of you fairly fast so no time for those not prepared to do the job. Thereby hangs the rub in these days as I'm not sure if our 'not used to manual work' population would cope with the physicality of picking in the fields/orchards. In a world where most things are push button or remote controlled many folks won't have the fitness levels needed to do the gruellingly demanding work and it IS hard work lifting, carrying weights, moving baskets and boxes to where they can be put on the trailer to go back to the store. Even the kneeling for strawberries, bending for potatoes and stretching for apples gives you aches and soreness until you're used to the work. I'm not sure there would be the appetite for our folks to do it!

GreyQueen

The physical conditoning needed to do manual labour is something that you can only get by doing it; gym-poseury won't cut it. You learn - even over winter, the lesser amount of gardening sees my hands soften and I get a blister or two when I start working the lottie again.

As to whether people could or would do it, as I limp off to w*rk, very many of the residents of Shoebox Towers, able-bodied late teens and twenty-somethings, are still lolling in the their pits or slouching on their doorsteps (in the more clement months) drinking coffee and faddling with their mobiles. Can't really see any good reason for them not working when people of their parents' and grandparents' generation have to graft and pay taxes to keep them in idleness.

So yeah, instant cure for unemployment for the physically able-bodied - the workers' minibuses will be leaving at 05.00 am from outside the JobCentre, you can be on the bus and on the farm and earn a living, or you get no government cheese, sonny.

If nothing else, being tired out from working would see them in bed at a reasonable hour and not keeping the rest of us awake into the wee small hours...........:rotfl:

DigForVictory

(I'll not be telling the lads spuds are harvested by machine these days - I've spent the last 5 years training them with fork & riddle & patience.)

I'm sort of minded to subsidise any unemployed soul who is studying at least 5 hours a day, just to a slightly lesser degree than the ones who have a choice of fields or hunger. However that's how we're doing it at home - I don't know if it would scale up to nationally.

I 'herd' cats as I 'herd' teenagers - with bribery. Our loved Explorer Scout leaders take a robust view that every meeting without food costs them bodies next week, so they ensure the growing metabolisms are fuelled & use scout skills (like fires) to conceal the evidence...

[Deleted User]

DigForVictory wrote: »

do you catch, box & confine cat first or shift everything else first?

We never boxed our cats. They just travelled on someone's lap, or (if I was alone in the car) on the front passenger seat.

I remember the last (or it may have been the next to last) time I had Buggalugs vaccinated.

I walked into the vets waiting room, cat in arms, and the vet stopped in his tracks and asked "Is that safe?"

I replied that we'd been using this method for 40-odd years (and four cats), and had never had a problem.

moneyistooshorttomention

The idea of 5 a.m. starts (ie for manual labour jobs) is one that hadn't occurred to me I must admit and that's another factor to take into account and I admit I wouldn't do that either. But, in my defence, I've done office jobs for many years and wouldn't see why I should be forced into such conditions when I obviously am a "worker - not a shirker" and how would one differentiate between those two categories realistically? Can't see that happening - ie one type of treatment for genuine workers (who've never done such hard physical work and it wouldn't be fair to force against our will - and life would be "made hard" for anyone official trying LOL) and another type of treatment for shirkers (ie those who've every intention of deliberately living off the rest of us and wouldn't take a "reasonable" job even if it came up).

Imo - one doesn't go out the door for work until some time 8 a.m. or thereafter (bar choosing to do so to have a "career job", rather than "job job" that one has chosen to do some distance away - and therefore a lot of commuting time is involved).

So - in fairness - I couldn't expect other people to be there "waiting for work" at a time of day I would refuse to even get up at in the first place (can probably count on one hand the number of times in my life that I've ever got up at that time - and it was always by choice on those occasions).

It is a problem I know - as to how this work is going to be done - but I thought that we are on the verge (ie got the prototypes) of machinery that will pick these crops for us?

[Deleted User]

Being brutally honest, should the Eastern Europeans who are here working the land and harvesting the crops we eat depart back to their home countries after Brexit then the choice is either for the people who do live here to get out and do the job no matter how much they object to manual labour and the hours they are required to put in to it, find and allow to enter post Brexit Britain another set of people from somewhere else in the world who will be prepared to do the hard work for the payment on offer or we all go hungry apart from what we can grow on our garden plots. I wouldn't like to hazard a guess as to which of those or any other alternatives would appeal most or least to the population as a whole.

mardatha

MITSTM without trying to pick a fight, your post sounds so condescending and snooty! If you were of working age and jobless, then do you think the Jobcentre is going to listen to you telling them you're not a manual worker and you won't get out of bed/start work until a certain time? I'd love to be a fly on the wall when you tried it!
I'm well educated, intelligent, (until ME dissolved my brain ) and was a member of Mensa - and I have done every sort of work under the sun. A job is a job is a job - a means to provide for one's family and pay one's way through life.
I'm afraid you are not ever going to survive hard times unless you can change your mindset!

DigForVictory

Bedsit_Bob wrote: »

We never boxed our cats. They just travelled on someone's lap, or (if I was alone in the car) on the front passenger seat.

When we were all a lot smaller, three daughters across the back seat before there were proper belts & we all had things to carry on our laps, mid sis had the cat. And a litter tray at her feet. Only a problem when cat was pregnant as travel sickness a problem (then had litter on middlesis' bed). Cannot recall that journey home!

This trip, fewer people, first trip for cat, and parents lacking the oomph &/or offspring to give chase. With weather closing, cat sensibly on a warm chair but quite alert to staff hustling about. Boxed only for collective peace of mind (of humans).

On return to usual home cat inspected every room - ignoring staff offers of food, drink, cuddles etc, and then settled on his customary radiator. Another time, a "cat sitter" is to be arranged, as he clearly was not happy being transported & not overly impressed by the wilds.

Mindful of your views on grey weather, Mrs LW, I have invited Himself to have a go at making a machine carder for wool. I can feel this spinning lark tugging at my ankles like a tide, so I plan to nudge him towards all the mechanical help I can get...

maryb

I appreciate that the Eastern Europeans want some certainty about what is going to happen and that is lacking at the moment. But when the dust settles why do people think they wouldn't still come for the foreseeable future for seasonal work? What replacement economic opportunities will there be for them in rural Eastern European villages, at least in the short term?

In many ways (farming excepted) I think it would be a good thing if we have to invest more in training because we can't bring in labour from abroad. For example, I've always thought it wrong to plunder poorer countries of their trained medical staff when there are lots of teenagers in this country who would like to go into nursing but can't get training places. Short term secondments, fine, that benefits everyone

British companies used to have a good record in training staff. Now, whenever I hear a company boss complaining that young people don't have the skills that business needs despite all their qualifications, I think to myself there's an outfit that doesn't want to spend any money on training (but usually doesn't want to pay any corporation tax either) Because we're all more or less useless when we start out and have to learn how to do our jobs