Bay Subtropicals
We spent our mornings this past week performing various tasks around Bay Subtropicals, an organic farm and orchard outside of Takaka.
Last Monday and Tuesday we worked in the hydroponic garden cleaning, planting and harvesting various lettuce varieties for sale to local restaurants and supermarkets.
Hydroponic gardening involves growing without soil, using only water fortified with various nutrients. First we prepare the long channels by scrubbing with chorine water and rinsing. Then we carefully place the small plants that have been growing in spun rock from Denmark that feels kind of like the spongy stuff that holds flower arrangements together at the bottom (nothing like rock). The spun rock sucks up the water and eventually dissolves as the roots grow to leave just lettuce and root. To harvest we lift the lettuce carefully to keep the root intact and wrap it in plastic sealed at the bottom. Water is added so that the lettuce actually stays alive and the customer can harvest leaves whenever they want but keep the rest of the plant alive. It’s quite impressive actually and the lettuce is the best looking we have ever seen. Below is a picture of the facility, which is in a plastic dome (this was great with the rainy weather early in the week).
Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday we worked in the orchards. We did a lot of weeding and harvesting. We wear little backpacks with huge storage space and walk around clipping fruit that is ready for market. Here we are as fruit pickers!
This farm grows mainly citrus fruits and avocados. We spent nearly all morning Thursday harvesting oranges and Friday working on limes and lemonades. Lemonades are amazing and we will definitely look for them in the states. They are like lemons but much sweeter, for example when you make lemonade to drink out of them no sugar is necessary. So they essentially taste like lemonade in fruit form. The ripe limes here are yellow instead of green. Kind of crazy, I guess it is Mexican limes we get in the states and those are green when ripe.
Saturday was tree maintenance day! We worked in another orchard sawing the bottom branches of trees off. We are not completely sure why or what kind of tree they were but it was enjoyable work. Debbie (owner of Bay Subtropicals) is an extremely hands off boss, she pretty much explains a task and then disappears. This is really nice in many ways but we don’t get to bother her with a ton of questions so we haven’t developed nearly as complete a picture of the organic gardening world as we did with the lamb docking.
Since it rained on Sunday we decided to work and save our day off for nice kayak weather. We packaged a ton of lettuce for Debbie’s special this week (she has too much lettuce and wants to get rid of it)! We really like the lettuce work; it is quite relaxing after getting kicked by lambs for three weeks. Monday we finished up our work here with some more cleaning and planting in the hydroponic garden. We are planning on kayaking Tuesday and leaving Takaka early on Wednesday morning.
