It is that time in the garden again, pruning time. How the seasons come around so quickly. I am sure time was much slower when I was young. We can tell spring has arrived as our first daffodils are out, and buds are appearing on our stoned fruit trees. For most of the year, Rozanne and I do the gardening, but for a couple of days each spring, we get a hand from Sergio to prune the stoned fruit trees and the flowering shrubs. I am not strong or steady enough to climb a ladder to prune these, or at least so, says Rozanne. I do the citrus myself, which we keep low and prune not annually but rather when required. Doing so makes for very attractive trees in the garden. Sergio helps us out and is assisted on occasion by his son Bruno, which is helpful as he speaks English, unlike his father. Despite the language challenges, we work out what needs to be done and how. My Portuguese remains limited; I feel dumb about not taking it up quicker.
“With the right attitude, language is rarely a problem in everyday life. A smile can open the doors of language barriers, and a multitude of tools can be used in place of spoken words. Hand signals, demonstration and facial expressions can normally get the job done.” - Peter McSporran
Sergio is a long-distance truck driver who collects fish from Northern European fishing ports and takes them to his employer, Frijobel, a frozen food processing company whose main factory is just down the road from us. It specialises in fish, although it produces many more products, from frozen vegetables to pizza. Sergio often sends a message on his travels from where he is collecting fish, which makes me wonder how frozen fish in our supermarkets can be cheaper than that of Northern Europe from where it comes. Today, Monday, I have just finished pruning the roses, which I do myself. Sergio has one more morning on the flowering shrubs and he will also be done for the year. He came to help us in the garden when I had my first cancer surgery, and he could not work due to Covid. He had time on his hands then and I am sure the income was welcome, not that gardening was an essential industry during Covid. He is a very busy man, so only comes for a couple of mornings now, and despite me suggesting he should instead take time off after his arduous trips rather than pruning my garden, he insists on continuing. Like all rural Portuguese, he has a plethora of jobs from hay baling, grass cutting and firewood. Always with a smile, and whenever we meet in our local bar, insists on buying me a beer—a gem. Reliable, polite, quiet-spoken, and friendly with nothing too much of a problem.
Oh, I will have to take a break just now as our Portuguese neighbours have just asked us to lunch in our favourite restaurant, colloquially called the ‘Old Ladies’ because of the age of the two women who run it. They serve up the most delicious traditional Portuguese food, soup, bread, olives, main course, and drinks, including ad-lib wine and coffee for €10. Not to forget the aguardiente for your coffee or just slugging which is also on the house.
Yes, inflation has come to Portugal, with the minimum hourly wage now being €5.40. Still, that is only thirty percent of the minimum wage in the UK. Many Portuguese work in Northern Europe, where unqualified workers are paid more than professionals here. For instance, a cleaner in France can get five times the Portuguese minimum wage and a gardener six times, double what a nurse is paid here. So many young people spend time outside Portugal saving for cars or even houses. Perhaps that is why we feel the population appears rather old. Food is cheap, but things such as cars are costly here; therefore, the EV age looks far away in Portugal, with fifty percent of the vehicles on the road being over thirteen years old. I should mention the one rule at the ‘Old ladies’: Do not upset the one who serves you if you want to eat. It can be lonely at the lunch table when all around are being served—just some trivia.
Getting back to my farming days, seed maize was my most important crop after tobacco. For the first few years, it was groundnuts but with the purchase of a second quota of seed maize with the Seed Co-op and Rydal farm, it superseded the groundnuts in importance. I had grown seed maize at both of my previous two employers, the Smiths and the Edwards, obtaining my seed growing licence while with them. I think you had to undergo three years under supervision in those days, but not so now. For some reason, I found myself under the watchful eye of the then senior seed inspector, Mike Caufield, a zealot in the seed maize land if there ever was one. I eventually learned his zeal could be tempered by leaving one conspicuous flower for him to vent his anger about. Or at least a ten metres aswathe around the rogue plant. Like many farmers, I was glad when he became a respected and successful plant breeder. I then had to obtain a quota, which I did in the late seventies and a second on the purchase of Rydal, a red soil farm purchased for this very reason, to grow seed maize. The seed maize and tobacco did not work for me on Diandra farm mainly due to a clash on the demand for labour during detasseling, the removal of the male flowering heads on the female plants and tobacco reaping. Further, both were high management tasks both requiring close supervision. In addition, the wet cold sandy soils of our area of Darwendale, just east of the Great Dyke, precluded high yields and even the use of some of the suitable herbicides for seed maize, which called on more labour to hand weed. Then, one year, we received the wrong male lines, discovering the fact just before pollination. Rightly or wrongly the Nicolle brothers were blamed, which led to some interesting meetings with the unique experience of them being shouted at by farmers rather than them at us. I was trying to establish myself in farming, so in trying to reduce the loss, I hand-pollinated twenty hectares of seed maize. This entailed collecting pollen in pepper cellars and sprinkling it onto the female plants’ silks collected from an area with the right male lines, which finally convinced me that if I was to continue with seed maize production, I had to separate it from my tobacco operations. I must add we had limited success but managed to salvage some of the seed production.
“The optimism of youth makes you persevere when all looks lost, while the cynicism of age more likely allows you to recognise the futility of your efforts.” - Peter McSporran
To do so, I decided to obtain further land with a dedicated labour force for seed crop production. So when Rydal farm came onto the market, we purchased it from Shaun White simply by going to the bank and asking for the money. Those were the days when banks had managers who knew farming and their customers' business and were happy to back the individual. They also seemed to have a whole lot more autonomy. Nowadays, you tick the boxes and the nominal bank manager sends your application off to Dubai or some such place where the application is analysed on the number of positive ticks. Woe betide if you have one negative as they far outweigh the positives. The person doing this is unlikely to be able to identify the difference between a maize or tobacco plant. With the purchase of Rydal, we also started growing seed wheat and seed soya. Both fitted in with the seed maize rotation, seed maize needing a rotational break year between crops grown on the same land.
The soya and wheat required combining, and for many years, having a small hectarage, we hired combines. As for the soya, initially, we grew seed, but in our movement to new land on Rydal, we found the lands along the Marodzi River were infected by sclerotinia, making the crop unsuitable for seed, and so bad we decided to stop growing soya on those fields. In further investigation, we learned that previous owners had grown intensive horticulture in those fields, which was the problem's source. The seed wheat and commercial soya could be harvested by machine, and I convinced Cathy Townsend from Ballineety, the late John Glanfield’s daughter, to partner in purchasing a combine harvester. This was made easy as her manager, Bill Billar, was the father of our manager on Rydal, Tommy Billar. This worked well, and many years later, before her death, Cathy told me it had been one of the best things she had done. So, some partnerships do work.
Disclaimer: Copyright Peter McSporran. The content in this blog represents my personal views and does not reflect corporate entities.
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