The life of a professional weeder
As I approach my last week of work in the Gisborne area I thought I’d write a little piece about the life of a professional weeder.
So not long after arriving in Gisborne I was over at a friends house (the surfer I’d met at the CS gathering) for a Bible study. His house mate, hearing I was looking for work, offered me a job doing weeding at the tree nursery he managed. I didn’t accept the offer initially
however a couple days later, after I’d realised that work is work, I told him I’d take the job. It came with the benefit of a place to park my van and access to facilities (kitchen, toilet, shower) the downside being I was 30 minutes outside of town staying in a field with no one around. The day starts at 7am and finishes at 3pm. It’s an earlier start then I was used to but I’ve grown to be a fan of these hours.
My day pretty much revolves around the rising and setting of the sun and finishing at 3pm means I still have a lot of the day to surf if it’s on. It’s not a particularly complicated job the old weeding. I walk along ankle high beds that are planted up with baby pine trees. They range from seedlings to slightly maturer tree at a couple years old. The beds are sprayed to kill the weeds however some are persistent and refuse to die. This is where I come in. Armed with a plastic bucket and a tool that looks like a bread knife with a hook angle grinded into the end I set to work pulling up the stubborn weeds doing my best not to disturb the growing trees. I won’t bore you with the weed varieties but there are a good number of different shapes and sizes. Once your bucket is full you either dump it in the back of the truck to be offloaded later or in a hedge line out of the way.
Then you repeat the process. By 9am I am getting thoroughly toasted by the sun.Temperatures have got up to 30 degrees C and apparently the UV rays are stronger down in NZ? The tan lines are no joke. In the mornings you can be dodging random showers from the sprinklers only to be searching them out in the afternoon. Sometimes a new activity is thrown into the mix like getting a water pump out of the pump shed or watering some strawberries however most of the time weeds are getting pulled. I am truly appreciative of the work however the truth is that it is back breaking, mind numbing work. The phrase bend your knees not your back now actually matters to me. After about an hour each day my back is already cooked. I have noticed it improve however from week 1 to 4. Whether this is my lower back actually getting stronger or just giving up I am not quite sure.
There are a few positives that I can take away from my time as a pro weeder however. The first being the time it has afforded me to listen to audio books and podcasts that I never would have gotten around to otherwise. The second positive being the mental resilience it has helped build up (I’m serious). To spend an hour weeding one bed just to come to the end of the line and head back the other way with no break is tough. When you look across the field and see another 30 rows it feels like there is no end in sight.
Then in the back of your mind you remember that there are 65 rugby pitches worth of tree beds and you just have to get your head down and keep going. The last upside is that I’m always outside. I would much rather endure the sun and rain then be stuck inside stacking shelves.
And that’s the work. I wonder what my next job will be?
