Raspberry growing was a constant manual effort. I hated it! Hoeing, weeding, pruning and carrying out canes were uninteresting, repetitive slavery, with no mechanical means to relieve the chores, only personal exertion. And this was always on a hillside. We grew them in three separate areas, one below the house and two above. To us boys it seemed a vast acreage, but really it was probably no more than an acre and a half. The crop would yield about two tons of fruit, whereas Herb Brown of Glen Huon produced more than twice that quantity. Long after the picking, early winter, when the leaves of the fruit-bearing canes had fallen, these had to be all cut out to make way for the new ones that would bear next season. The young canes were nearly as tall as the old ones. The old ones were usually cut out by women using gloves, for they were thorny. The discarded canes were placed in bundles in the rows and it was the boy’s job to carry them out, where they were piled into a huge heap to be burned, and far enough away so as not to burn or damage the standing canes. I have bad memories of seeing those rows stacked with canes from bottom to top and making hundreds of trips up the hilly rows taking them out by armfuls. Scratched hands and arms were part of the task, for we never had the luxury of gloves.
Once or twice a year it was necessary to hoe all the rows and take out all the weeds by hand near the raspberry bushes. Then we would fertilize, usually with bonedust. That seemed to be the standard plant food those days. Later came blood-and-bone. There was no way to work the raspberries with horse and cultivator; it was all hand work, and I vowed that this would not be my way of life when I grew up. Then came the picking season, and this was rather more to my liking. Besides, we would have a number of other people come to help with the picking. When the fruit was ripe it had to be picked in its prime condition. A small box holding four or five pounds would be strapped to our waist so that both hands were free to hold the branches and pull off the fruit. Sometimes they were hanging in such convenient clusters that one could use two hands to gather the fruit. The amount a picker could gather in a day depended on the crop. Some fast pickers could pick 200 pounds a day, and one champion picked some 300 pounds at Glen Huon. We regarded 100 pounds a fair day’s effort. We boys hardly ever achieved this much. Some would be placed in buckets and some in punnets to be sold to the shops, while others less carefully picked were emptied into large casks and taken to the jam factory.
At the close of the picking season there would be much fun when young men and girls would wash each others’ faces with raspberries. Imagine someone coming stealthily behind you with a couple of handfuls of raspberries and squashing them all over your face. The mashed fruit with its juice would get down your neck both front and back. Faces and clothing would be in a rosy red mess. It was all taken in good fun as part of the picking diversion. But you were useless until you were stripped to the waist and had a good wash.
We had quite a few gooseberries, too, and these were savage things to handle, with their long thorns. For this effort you would need a stool and dish. Put the dish under the gooseberry bush, pick up a limb of fruit, dodging the vicious thorns if you could, and proceed to drop them into the dish. Blackcurrants were picked the same way, only they had no thorns, which made them a more friendly game. But my pet aversion for picking was getting up at daybreak on a frosty morning and going out to pick peas. This was cruel, and those were merciless mornings, yet it had to be done in order to get the produce off to market.
My father was never occupied with the farm. Fred Peterson, who became my brother-in-law, bought the whole property. Through his industry and good management it prospered. We occupied the house just as if we owned it. It was several years later that he married my sister Lydia, after which we shifted to the old Brandstater homestead on Springvale Road. It was always Fred who took the fruit to Hobart by way of cart and horse. The horse, a large size hack, was lively and rather erratic. One day, going down Pierce’s Hill, he plunged over a steep embankment, spilling the cart and contents over the hillside.
