We are eating BC pears now. I’m glad we can support the BC growers.
The fruit I enjoyed picking most was pears because they were a good size and the trees were not all that high, could reach all the fruit with a 12 foot ladder.
In the days before bins, a full picking bag would fill an apple box. It seemed like more progress was being made. Then you’d place an empty box on top of the full box and return to picking. Start at the top of the ladder and pick your way down. Once the boxes were stacked four high then you start a new stack. With good picking from four trees you would get twenty to thirty boxes filled. I could pick six boxes an hour over an eight hour period, not terribly fast, but , as Wally would say, “just plugging along”. The most I ever picked was seventy five boxes. I was exhausted by the end of the day.
Around mid afternoon, Wally would begin to pick up the full boxes with the tractor and trailer. it was usually a two man job with one placing the boxes on the trailer and the other stacking them. The outside rows were one high while the inside rows were two and three high. When the trailer was full, it was off to the platform where the full boxes were stacked six high or maybe seven high for I don’t exactly remember. The boxes would then be picked up later on that day by the Oliver Co-Op packing house truck driver for transport to the processing plant. The driver had a dolly to wheel the stacks of fruit boxes onto his flatbed truck. Once loaded, he would cinch everything down with cables and off he would go.
The work was very labor intensive. The introduction of bins reduced that intensity immensely, but it seemed to take a long time to fill a bin compared to the time it took to fill an apple box.