The Cottage Smallholder

Post edited 9:40 pm – Mon 12-Jul-10 by Danny

They do look huge, Joanna. Or is that a trick shot with a tiny mustard spoon and a sheet of kitchen towel cut in half?

Mention of blackcurrants (and I have described this on here before, so please forgive the repetition) takes me back in an instant to when my dad used to cultivate approx three acres for the now-defunct nearest Ribena factory in Tipperary. This was early 1960s. He hired loads of local schoolboys to do the picking. It was not hard work but it was boring, obviously. The pay was 6 pence ( a "tanner" = £0.025) per small punnet and 9 pence for a large one. Punnets were weighed because there were so many cheats who would insert a few stones at the bottom, so he had to employ a friend to do the weighing and paying. A false punnet might weigh the expected amount but would look too unfull to the eye.

The crop was transported the quarter mile to the local railway station in the little trailer pulled by his tiller / rotovator with us kids sitting on the side boards. That branch railway was sut down in 1965 (a big mistake in hindsight when tourism began to blossom). I cannot recall what he did after that happened.

Picking praties " you are spot on, Danuta. Terrible backbreaking work picking them up after they had been dug and left on top of the ridges or whatever. Equally bad was planting them manually if you were the putter-inner following the digger of the hole, who could at least remain upright.