So today is something a little different, well quite a bit different, and a first over here on Lemon Pea lifestyle etc, but something I've wanted to do for a while and I think it's a something that a lot of bloggers look forward to doing at some point in their blogging journey.
What is this new and mystical thing? I hear you cry. Well lovely readers, it's a guest post. Yep, once I've finished rambling through this little intro there's someone else writing.
Who is this someone else? You ask. Well this someone else is Emily aka Reluctant Wanderlust. Like me she's from the UK and is currently travelling Australia however is doing it in a slightly different way to me and has seen other things to me.
So after a few tweets back and forth we thought it would be fun, both for us and our readers, to do a collab and write a post for each other's blogs about an element of our travels. For my blog Emily has written a sweet post about her time spent on a vegetable farm in South Australia. It's something I think you'll all like and it also gives you some other ideas of rural work you can do in Aus to get your second year visa.
Emily's a great presence online and I really enjoy her blog so make sure you check it out. A post I've written for her blog is up there today also. Check her out on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook as well to keep up with her travels.
So over to Emily, the other one.
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Working towards your second year visa, should you be entitled to one, is always something on the minds of most backpackers when going to Australia and with so much choice of where to do it and what kind of regional work to take part in. I decided to take part in HelpX on a Vegetable farm in South Australia.
I found HelpX through a friend who was about to swap from one farm to another. I had been in quite a dire state when the offer came and felt stuck in Sydney with money running low and my morale even lower. Gumtree and work agencies were getting me no where quickly so I jumped at the opportunity. two days later I flew to Adelaide and caught the train to Gawler where my friends picked me up and we drove to the farm. On leaving the farm the farmers were kind enough to drop me at Elizabeth train station as my friends with the car had left by here and the nearest train/bus/town was half an hours drive away. I would not have been able to walk it with all my belongings.
Working on a vegetable farm is hard work on your back, I’m not going to lie to you I suffered from a severe amount of sciatica by the end of it which I had to manage with pain killers but I also figure working 88 days straight will do that to you. Luckily for me the days weren’t particularly long and my farmer was very considerate and made sure on the hot days we were kept out of the sun under the mesh or not working as long. Sun screen is pretty much going to be your friend during your time as you spend a lot of time in the fields weeding and picking and during the summer months it will be too hot to wear a shirt to cover up.
The hardest thing to weed is greens, for me at least, as everything looks so similar and your really have to pay attention to what you are weeding and one small row or greens can take over 4 hours to weed which just ended up making me feel frustrated and like I hadn’t done any work at all. Some weeds are also easier to pull than others and creepy crawlies are rife. I once found Red Back spiders in a row of rocket I was weeding, a large red back also came in for packing on some beetroot once too. This is however is a rare occurrence and mostly you will come into contact with small insects and garden spiders which are harmless but scare the living daylights out of your when they run over you hand.
Picking is easier than the weeding, you can get more done, it allows you to move around more and passes time much easier. Zucchini needs the most attention as the produce grows so quickly thatit needs picking everyday. We were actually picking around 36 buckets a day at one point. Packing was actually the most fun I had on the farm, which while it can be monotonous if you can get the radio on and sing out some tunes with your work mates it certainly makes it more fun. There is a lot more that goes into packing for a farmers market than you would think. From cleaning each individual tomato before it is packed to weighing out the bags and checking for quality all while stood on your feet and belting out the latest Taylor Swift song on repeat on the radio. Multi-tasking at its finest.
I hope you all enjoyed this guest post. Let me know in the comments below and make sure you check out all Emily's links and let her know what you thought of the post as well.
Until next time,
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