Orcharding – Philip Mardon

Jim Watt: Today we welcome Philip Mardon to talk to us. You all know Pernel Orchard? He’s going to explain where that name came from. And I was just commenting before that we haven’t had too many orchardists or arable farmers talking to us. Well, it’s Hastings and it’s the Heretaunga Plains, and it’s part of our heritage; very much so. We have had pasturalists talk to us, but yeah – Phillip, for that reason it’s especially good to welcome you here. And you’re not a Johnny-come-lately orchardist because you tell me you are the third generation at Pernel, and it dates from about 1912, so we’re looking forward very much to hearing you. Philip Mardon.

[Applause]

Philip Mardon: Thank you. Well look, I’ve written a little bit out to start with as an introductory, and then I was actually going to look at these pictures and talk about the industry and my involvement as we go through the pictures. But when asked by Petey [Piet] van Asch if I would give a talk on the history of fruit growing in Hawke’s Bay I remembered that I had a copy of this book written by Rose Mannering; it was on our book shelf at home – ‘100 Harvests’. And by coincidence I had also recently been given a copy of the ‘60 Miles of Fruit [Peach] Trees’, and that was given to me by Jon Williams just recently – you might know Jon Williams – written by Des Harris. That’s the story of the Frimley Canning Factory. Both of these books have some fascinating accounts of the early days of fruit growing in this district; and if you have the chance to get hold of them, well, have a look – they really have [door closing] some very interesting historical material in them.

In a very readable way ‘100 Harvests’ tells the story from the time the first apples were planted in 1840, to the first exports to London in 1892, and the establishment of the Hawke’s Bay Fruit Growers Association [in] 1899, up into 1999 when that book was published. My brother, David, was president of the Fruit Growers Association at that time when that book was done, and we as an industry celebrated one hundred years of fruit growing, and of the Fruit Growers Association. The courage and optimism of those involved through the generations shines through. When you read bits out of this book you can see it coming through. Neither droughts, floods, frosts, gales, hail storms, pests and diseases, compliance laws and regulations, laws nor trade policies diverted the overall forward momentum of the industry. Through the hundred years the constant theme of seeking to improve fruit varieties, achieve better management and better marketing, dominates. This is the industry that I have spent my life in, an industry that I am proud to have been a part of. And this my story, so I’ll be talking to you from my perspective of the industry and how it’s developed, changed; some things for the better some things not so, I don’t think, over my lifetime.

Our family history, as just was mentioned earlier, is I’m the third generation Mardon to be involved in fruit growing. My grandparents came to this area in 1912. My grandmother was one of the Lowes; she was one of twelve children, three girls, nine boys. And the Lowes play a big part in the history of fruit growing in this region. Archie Lowe was one of the older ones – he had Sunnybank Orchard down near Stortford Lodge opposite the sale yards, and that’s where Sunnybank Crescent and Lowe Street comes from. No orchard there now.

And just if I can digress for a minute, talking about the Lowes – not this coming Sunday but the next there’s this memorial service at St Matthews’ [Church] for George Lowe. And George was the person that was with Ed Hillary, [Sir Edmund Hillary] and you probably know all this. But his second wife is actually out here now, staying with the younger brother, Reuben. and there’s a service as I said, at St Matthews’ at ten o’clock.

However, we just came upon this book recently and it’s written by another chap, but taken all the letters that George wrote home over that time … well it actually was a couple of years … ‘Letters from Everest from George Lowe’. Look, if any of you get a chance to get it and read it, it is a fascinating little book … fascinating story because George really was the unsung hero of the climbing of Mount Everest. And I’m not taking anything away from Ed Hillary or Sherpa Tensing, but [the] part that George played in getting them up to the top was really fantastic. So I’ve got thirty-odd pictures here, slides that were taken over a period of time, and just as we look at them I was hoping to sort of cover areas like sprays and spraying; how things have changed; picking and handling – and I’ve bought along a few boxes; I know some of you will [chuckles] be familiar. Some of you I know come from fruit growing backgrounds, and you’ll be familiar with these boxes and labels and …

And just digressing again – it always amused me, ‘cause we only had the one label when we were exporting in wooden cases, and no matter what the colour of the fruit was in the box we always had ‘Red Apples’. [Laughter] I used to think, ‘Well what a surprise [for] those who opened the boxes in England’ or wherever, ‘cause in those days a lot of it went to England, ‘and got green apples’. ‘Cause that’s Granny Smith [chuckle] or Ballarat or Golden Delicious, [laughter] but the label on the outside was ‘Red Apples’. Anyway, just a digression.

So packing and packaging I’ll touch on, and some of the photos you’ll see; varieties – how they’ve changed, and varieties that we used to grow; no longer. Marketing – I’ll try and touch on a little bit about the Apple and Pear Board, it’s rise and fall. The way the trees, especially the apple trees, how we grow the trees now, the shape of the apple trees. Not so much change with stone fruit but certainly with apples, and to a lesser extent perhaps, with pears. Personalities – there’s some people in the industry and I’ll try and remember that have really been great personalities over the years – I’ll try and remember to give you a couple of funny little incidents. And frost control – I’ve written that down; we seem to be getting more frosts now out of season, and you certainly will’ve seen all the wind machines around. So those are the things I was just sort of hoping to cover in the time available, and I’ll probably go too long – you just tell me, ‘cause it’s something I’ve been involved with all my life so I’ve got plenty of information.

[Shows slides throughout talk]

Okay – that photo was taken about 1961, and we’ve actually got that blown up and it’s in our café. I realise when I see it now how the one at home in the café has faded. But anyway, that’s the old smoko home … Mother was a great person to provide smoko. We were eating scones or something there, I think – cold winter day, and you’ll see a bit of a wooden ladder; the old wooden ladders, they were a work of art. They were made out of white pine, and the Bixley family made those. They were very, very good ladders but prone to breaking. Then we went to steel ladders, and now aluminium. The shape of the trees, those are apple trees … actually I think that’s a peach tree in the foreground there, and my dad is in the back there with the hat pulled down over his eyes.

Some of you might remember Wilson’s Pharmacy … middle of town by the State Theatre … the chap on the left is Michael Wilson; he’s since died. And then this young chap here, young Earl, he worked for us for many, many years; has his own orchard now out at Longlands. And my brother, David, on this end and myself in the middle.

So the next one is pruning; I picked that out, and I myself even laugh at that … one of us, it might be myself, perched up there pruning Cox’s Orange, I think they were. And you might see, those are spacers … wooden spacers that we used to put in to push the branches out to try and open the tree. Those were the days when we had big multi-leader, strong root stocks, multi-leader trees. Nowadays we don’t have that, we’ve got much, much smaller trees. The next one, and pruning … those are WBC, William Bon Chretien pears; that block’s gone now. And a hydralada.

I wanted to touch also on the part that hydraulics have played in the industry in my lifetime, and how we now have hydraladas, which are a fantastic machine for the work that they do. We use them the whole year round. And we have hydraulic pruners … cutters … that are hooked on. We run ours on LPG [liquid petroleum gas] – you can see the gas bottle there. But because they’re hydraulic you can hook in these hydraulic cutters which make pruning so much easier. We still use secateurs or a saw, but for those bigger cuts that are in between, it’s just so much easier. You’ve got to watch you don’t cut your fingers, but [chuckles] they really are a great machine and a great help. I mean we use them for picking, for thinning, and as you see there, with [for] pruning.

But forklifts – you know, just coming back to hydraulics – when my brother, David and I left school, or even before we left school, when we came home from school our job was to stack up the cases that had been picked in the orchard and then cart them up to the shed. Everything picked into old bushel … or kerosene cases, and then lifted manually onto a trailer and then taken up and stacked in the shed – a hang of a lot of manual work. Nowadays the fruit’s picked into bins as you probably all know, and then transported up to the shed with a mini lift on a tractor; and then the forklifts in the yard, they can do all sorts of things. I was thinking last night too – bin dumpers, where each case used to be tipped down in the old Benseman graders; and now the bins are pushed under the water because the apples float. Pears are a bit more difficult ‘cause they don’t necessarily float … they’re denser. So they float out, and that’s all done with hydraulics … hydraulic rams. So as you can see, I’m just trying to point out that hydraulics have really played a very, very important part.

Okay. Now that’s just taken about 1961 as well, in Pakowhai Road, just in off Pakowhai Road. Very wet winter … 1955 and ‘61 were very, very wet winters … and we as an industry round the district lost a huge number of trees, especially stone fruit; peaches do not like wet feet. And a lot of trees had been planted on marginal land, and it was a dark winter day and it rained like hang, and it was early-ish, like nine or ten o’clock in the morning after a very wet night; and just to show you the water that was lying there. Those are Granny Smith trees – again, look at the growth on them, the one-year-old growth, upright. Our pruning methods now are just so different to those days. I look back and think, ‘what the hell did we know?’ [Chuckle] The changes – the way we pruned – we cut so much, and it made them grow even more.

But the other thing I was going to say was the fact that tile draining has made all the difference. You know, there was a chap that [who] worked for the MAF [Ministry of Agriculture & Fisheries] in those days, or the Department of Agriculture, Selwyn Wilson … some of you may known. Talking about George Lowe, I think that this chap, Selwyn Wilson, was one of the unsung heroes of our region in the work that he did in designing tile draining for all the areas that were suffering from wet feet, ‘cause as I said, there was [were] a lot of trees died.

And the Riach family with their with new machinery that put the tile drain, the tile pipes, you know the clay pipes? They were made up in Wairoa; they come down by rail and we used to go down to the railway station and cart them home, out of the big open trucks. I think that factory in Wairoa’s long gone, but there were thousands of metres, or probably almost hundreds of miles, of tile drains put in over a period of years under the design of this Selwyn Wilson, which was done free through the MAF. You paid for the tiles of course and you paid for drainage contractor to do it, but they were experts in their field, and it really made a big, big difference to where we could grow fruit trees in the district, and the losses now are minimal from wet feet.

That’s just a shot or of the Winter Nelis pear tree. That’s actually down at Sunnybank, which is the Lowe family and I mentioned earlier about the Lowes; I digressed a wee bit, but that’s on the original Lowe property. The Lowe family … there was [were] lots of the brothers, my dad’s uncles, who settled around the district, and Jock Lowe was out this way … some of you will remember Jock. So they played a very important part sort of over the war years.

And that’s just a shot of Black Doris plums, and I put that one in because of you folk, the Lay family, and we used to supply the Wyona Cannery for Frank Lay, which [who] was your uncle – you know where they were, down on Napier Road; and we supplied them for a long, long time with Golden Queen peaches and Black Doris plums. Those trees have long gone, but we still grow the Black Doris in another block, and we supply Wattie’s now.

So that’s just a shot I put in of [cough] … I used to keep a few bees; I’ve got a veil on there, [chuckle] I wasn’t too fussed on stings. The old chap on the left was a part time … just a hobbyist beekeeper, but the stings didn’t worry him. That’s his son leaning over the rail on the left and my sister, Joyce, who has since died, looking along [coughing] a little bit further back, away from the bees. They were just having a look to see how they were doing. But after some years I started to get more reaction from bee stings so I gave it away. Now we’ve got the varroa mite.

Now that’s golden queen peaches in flower, and I put that in because of the oil pots [for] those of you who’ll remember the days when we had the frost control – well we didn’t have the frost control methods that we have now. And so that’s the black oil pots there, and many of you will remember the smog and the smoke that we used to get, but you know, they saved the crops; but we’ve progressed from there.

The next one I think, is one that I took – that’s taken at night with the pots going, and I moved the camera a tiny bit but we always thought it look like … you know the old pound [laughter] … sign? In many ways it was relevant because of the cost [audience commenting and laughing] of the fuel when you lit … how much it cost for burning the fuel. [Continuing comments and laughter] It was in pounds then. And you can almost see the sort of smoky area, and in the morning there was smoke everywhere.

Comment: It was thick black smoke.

Phil: Thick black smoke; and most of the time you’d get a westerly drift and it would move out to sea, but occasionally there’d be a little bit of an easterly get back up and blow it back in, and there was hell to play [pay] then.

One of our earliest sprayers, an air blast sprayer; but of course if you go back the spraying was done originally by horse drawn little units pulling a little tank and a pump. Then it went to tractors pulling the pump, and the orchardist would spray the trees with a handgun. There’s a story, and I remember this story was told by Ken Kiddle … some of you will know Ken Kiddle who became the chairman of the Apple and Pear Board. He had orchards down – and the family still have orchards down off River Road. Ken only died a year or something ago. And Ken told the story that when he first bought his orchard and his wife, Marion, and he were spraying, she was driving the tractor. In those days most of us had clean cultivation under the trees; we didn’t have grass. We’ve changed now to having grass, but anyway, so Marion was driving the tractor and Ken was at the back spraying the trees and the idea was that you would call out to the driver to move up a bit each time. And it was hot morning, and Marion was wanting to do other things at home and she was out on this tractor. So Ken called out, “Move up”, and she was half asleep and she didn’t move. And he called out again – about two or three times he called, and so in frustration he picked up a clod of dirt and threw it. The idea was that he was going to hit the tractor, [laughter] wake her up to move up. And [of] course he hit her; [laughter] and so she got so wild, she got off the tractor and said, “Do your spraying yourself”, and went home. [Laughter] So poor old Ken then had to … oh, there’s nothing more frustrating than getting on the tractor, shifting it up a bit, spraying, getting off … [Laughter] I thought that was an amusing one to tell.

So then we went to that sprayer there. I put that in because that’s our original home way over the back, which has since been shifted. But in the early days [chuckle] … my early days … we grew a lot of tomatoes when the trees were small when we had planted this new block; we grew tomatoes for Wattie’s, and we had a very heavy crop. Just going back to that photo there, just to show you innovation of how we sprayed [chuckle] the plants because we weren’t geared up for cropping. However, it worked – see, there’s a plank stuck in under there, and see the chap on the back – he’s spraying the row that we’re [?], and the other one’s being sprayed. And by the look of it I would guess it was copper, because the other thing, the changes there have been in the sprays and the spraying methods … but the sprays we used to use in those days … And some of you’ll remember Black Leaf 40? It’s nicotine sulphate – terrible stuff! Arsenate of lead – terrible thing.

[You can see] my brother David there – that was probably copper which wasn’t quite so bad; but arsenate of lead was a terrible thing, but that was for the control of codling moth. Nowadays we’ve got onto this IFP [Integrated Fruit Production] programme – codling moth and leaf roller there – and it’s so totally different. We’re now reliant … well what we’re trying to do is create the situation in the orchards that encourages the predators. And so many new predators have been introduced, and so we’re trying not to put any sprays on that will affect the life cycle of the predator ‘cause that’s our first line of defence. And it’s so different now and so much better than it was years ago.

[A] load of tomatoes out at Cornes’, a well-known carrier; one of the Cornes is from the Cornes family, orcharding people, in Oak Avenue. All loaded up there by hand – that’s why I’m short … long arms [laughter] … loading these damn tomatoes. One year we did twelve thousand cases of tomatoes into Wattie’s.

That’s just a photo of early peaches and plums on our old trailer. When we were picking peaches or stone fruit we used to pick and pack in the orchard, and this is a wooden tray I’ve got here. We still use the wooden trays in our shop; but when we were sending them away to markets the stone fruit went away in the old 7×7 – this case here. You orcharding people will remember that one, it was a terrible thing to pack … very difficult. But they’re all the same length, the same footprint in a way, as the bushel case. And there’s a pear case there – pears are heavier, so the boxes were a little bit shallower. But these things were sent away; the best fruit was sent away in trays, and the slightly – not poorer quality – the next grade were sort of sent away in these. And it was all railed from the Hastings station, and therein lies a story. But this tray here, they were wired together in threes as a crate, and cleats on the end. Because sometimes you’ve got bigger peaches or … yeah, mainly peaches … you added a bit on here by the cleat; they haven’t been clicked on, so that the next tray didn’t bruise the other ones. And then they were put in sets of three and wired together. Hard work dealing with these wires.

Just quickly, I just wanted to say, [cough] just an idea of the peaches that we used to grow, and some of you’ll remember some of these varieties, long gone – Sneeze, a little white peach that ripened before Christmas; Levanqua – remember the Levanqua? Hi Zurdee, which those are; another one very similar, Bridge Red May, which were white flesh … lovely peaches but hard to grow; Buttercup; Wiggins – any of you remember the old Wiggins peach, which was lovely white peach? Carmen; Anderson Seedling; Mary’s Choice; Kalamazoo; and then a peach called Million Dollar – its real name was JFK, but it was called the Million Dollar peach. It was bred in America. And it was interesting – in the cannery book from the Frimley Cannery, they grew mostly Kalamazoo and Mary’s Choice before the Golden Queen peach came along. And then a very late peach called Kahurānaki, which was a terrible thing.

Plums – Duffs Early Jewel; Billington; Coe’s Golden Drop Doris, the ordinary Red Doris which came out before Black Doris; and then Omega … some of them we still grow a lot of; Satsuma. Some of you might remember those varieties.

And then after we went from picking in the orchard in bushel cases, the move was to go to bulk handling. Now before we went to these big trailers we actually went to a big bin, and you ladies will remember them; and that was with the advent of hydraulics you could lift they, or they were put on a trailer. Then we went to these trailers; that’s my brother, David, and his daughter Roslyn, towing two trailers which held about ninety bushels of fruit. And we picked into those; they were towed up to the shed and then tipped up slightly, and the fruit slid out onto the conveyor belt before it went up onto the grader. So that was another step in the process over the years, of going to water before we had the water dumping system perfected. When you put your first bag of apples in them, you think well, you’ll never fill this up. [Chuckles] It’s so debilitating with such a big area to fill.

But when we got to Granny Smiths, [microphone interference] and we grew a lot of Granny Smiths in those years, we had a chap that used to come over from Queensland. He was a cane cutter in the days when a lot of the cane over there was cut by hand. And he’d come over here for the apple season, and he was a fantastically good picker; he could fill three of those a day. He picked well, I mean it wasn’t as though he bruised the fruit; he was a very, very hard worker, obviously, to fill three of them a day. He’d start, you know, at the crack of dawn, and he was still there just about when it was getting dark.

Question: Phil, what would he be paid then? Would he’ve been on contract?

Phil: Yes he would’ve been, yeah, but he made good money. But he worked hard for it … worked hard for it. I really can’t remember [chuckle] how much it was.

Now that’s a crop of Sturmer – you’ll remember the Sturmer apple? Those trees are long gone and they’re the old vase shape; it’s a bit hard to tell there, but that was a very nice block and when my dad bought that block, which is in the home part of Pakowhai Road, they were there. That particular little property was owned by the chap McNab, and that was another well known Twyford name; McNabs had a lot of orchards in Twyford – there’s McNab Road – and that block adjoins my grandparents’ block, the ten acres that my grandparents … and I missed to say at the beginning that when they came here in 1912 it was my great uncle Arch Lowe, George’s father, who sussed out this block for my grandparents. My grandfather was a flax miller really, and he’d moved up from the South Island and ended [in the] Palmerston North area where they were flax milling. And that didn’t go well that venture, and they came up here – this Arch Lowe said, “Come on up here, and I’ll look for a piece of land.” And this piece of land had two acres of fruit. My grandfather wasn’t really in fruit growing and it was my mum and dad that really got the whole place going. The two properties adjoined, and we ended up with about seventeen acres … probably sounds a bit convoluted … and then we expanded from there. But this was on the original piece on Pakowhai Road, and they were very heavy cropping, those old Sturmers. But now we struggle to sell, we’ve got two trees of Sturmer and we struggle to sell them, [chuckle] they’re just not popular, not known.

The other thing I probably forgot to say was that the name, Pernel, of our orchard came from my mum[‘s] and dad’s names, which were Percy and Nell. Some people think that’s our surname, [chuckles] and we get called Mr Pernel. [Chuckles]

[A person talks constantly while Philip is speaking]

Now that’s off the top of our packing shed roof because there was a thunderstorm out to the north of us and [it] probably had hail in it. My daughter and I put these together the other night, and she said, “Did you actually get hail out of that?” And I said, “I don’t think so. I think we missed.” But we didn’t miss every time; as you know the hail can do a terrific lot of damage in a very short time, you know, one side of the road can get hail and the other side misses. And my brother David was president of the association at the time of this huge hailstorm that the district had in 2004, I think it was, and that took out half of the crop … the apple crop. We missed by a whisker; we were just down the road. We got heavy rain but no hail, and yet the next orchard down the road, Bute Orchard, going back toward town got hail, and from there on virtually all of that side of town. This was in very early March, I think … or late February … we’d just got underway with Gala, and the damage was just devastating. I’ve never seen hail damage … I mean it knocked pieces of bark off the trees; not only damage – the fruit was just minced in the areas that got it worst. So hail can do a lot of damage. We can take out hail insurance, but it’s a bit dicey; but anyway, that’s why I put that in.

There’s a shot of our newer packing shed … just gives you an idea of the wooden cases; I think we were packing pears. The pears were [interference] in a bin. That’s when we first went into bulk handling, before we went to trailers. The bins [are] put up on a stand and boards in the front, just there, are pulled out and the fruit flows down on to the old Benseman grader – remember the Benseman graders? And there’s two people there packing, Dad up there I suppose, grading, and down here there’s somebody working with the lidding machine, and wiring, ‘cause all the cases were wired, the export cases; that was a terrible job. There’s the roll of wire there, and we had two different machines for wiring; remember the old one with the wind handle? And then you cranked it up to tighten the wire. You could never buy the machine, you had to hire it – can’t think of the company; they were a Jewish family [laughter] so that you had to buy their wire. But the original machine that you pulled up tight was probably the better one; then we went to a slightly different one where you pulled the handle over and then back, and then as sure as hell, if you didn’t get it right it would break, then you’d have to go round again with the wire. It was very, very hard on your thumb. Comment: Gerard.

Phil: Gerard – that was the name, I think. Yes, so there was a lot of hand work, and if they go into cartons which we did in later years, it was a great move because if any of them fell down they’d splinter and break and the fruit would be damaged. And I used to think, ‘Heck, I wonder if the way they were packed and the pressure on them … and then the loading on the truck with a forklift.’ But before we got to that we loaded the truck by hand; all the cases were stacked on the truck, taken into town to the Apple and Pear Board depot in King Street, and offloaded by hand again … every case. And I can still hear the noise of the steel conveyors with the rollers, and they’d go whizz! And the cases would whizz along into the depot where they were stacked in the cool store before being shipped out; taken out by truck and then over to Napier. And of course the wharfies, you know, each layer was put in the hold of the ship. They’d put planks down most of the time; some of the times they wouldn’t … [they’d] walk all over the boxes, so no wonder they got to England and they were bruised.

The carton made a fantastic difference with the fibre trays, the Friday trays as they were called. The Friday – that was a bit confusing that – it was a patent taken out in America by the people that designed this – I’m sure you know what I mean, those moulded papier mache trays? Their name was German name and they anglicised it to the name ‘Friday’, but that was a bit confusing because people used to hear and think, ‘Why has he called it Friday? Why haven’t we got a Thursday or a Wednesday?’ [Chuckles] But it was just a trade name – there’s the carton up there, and the trays fitted inside and you packed into them and that made a terrific difference.

That was just a shot of some … I think those are Granny Smith’s again, 02 -each of the varieties had a number. We’ve got one case missing there, I’m not sure why. They were always stacked on their side with the cleats at the end; I mean, the writing was the other way, but that’s how they were stacked on the pallet.

That chap … that’s Sid Carrington … worked for us for many, many years; a well-known family from over Frimley, Twyford area, Carringtons. And he put on this funny old hat … anyway, that’s just to give you an idea of that.

And that’s loading when we transitioned from the days when we loaded by hand, then to forklifts; and pretty primitive, but they worked, and there was an attachment on the back of the tractor which made it very difficult to load, but it was the move away from loading by hand. and then they were offloaded by more sophisticated forklifts and went into the Apple and Pear Board depot.

That’s our old packing shed. And then we went into a new packing shed, and we imported a new grading system from America. My brother, David, built a lot of the equipment. Those ladies there … some of those ladies have worked for us for many, many years. Obviously Granny Smiths; and grading. We don’t pack our own export fruit now. We still pack [for the] local market, but some years ago before the demise of the Apple and Pear Board … the Apple and Pear Board went through a lot of changes. And unfortunately we were encouraged to … well, the CEO [Chief Executive Officer] at the time thought there were far too many packhouses, and they would be better off with bigger packhouses and they bought into place lots of regulations which made it difficult for smaller packhouses. And so at that time we decided we would not upgrade – we had to go to colour sorting and all sorts of things, so we gave up packing export fruit and it was the wrong thing to do we realised afterwards. However …

That’s just a shot of the packhouse at the time, the other end, with the cartons. In those days we used to make up the cartons, the inner and the outer; there was a walkway up above, up in here. You walked along and hung the inner and the outer, which was [were] pushed in together on like a washing machine, above the packer. The packer would reach up and pick the carton off the hook up above, pack into it, and then the carton would come along – you can just see there’s some coming along there. They were all wrapped … that was Granny Smith … wrapped in purple oil paper, because Granny Smith had a bad habit in those years of developing a disorder which came about with cool storage, called scald, and the paper was impregnated with an oil base. And it was very nice to wrap the fruit because everything was wrapped in those days, and by wrapping it with this oil paper, purpley-coloured oil paper, it prevented this disorder. But we went away from that because we drenched the fruit before it went into the system with a chemical which stops scald anyway, ‘cause the cost of paper was very, very high – it was produced at Kawerau by the Caxton people. So that cut a lot of cost, so now there’s nothing wrapped at all.

So the packer would then put the carton on the conveyor; and you can’t see there, but it came around and it was glued up – the bottom and the top were glued up by hot [??] when it went through this gluing machine.

I put that in because … well, I’m talking about hydraulics and forklifts. That was a little forklift – the forks aren’t on it. David made that from a little unit that – some of you will remember when the railway line went over the Remutakas, the old line that went over the top – and then the Remutaka tunnel was put through. And when it was finished they sold off some of the equipment that was no longer used, and these little units were used in the tunnel; I think they had a little bucket on the front. I think they sold them by tender, and he got this little unit and converted it into a forklift, as I said. Well, it was in the process of being converted, so that was our first little forklift. Nowadays they’re much more sophisticated, [chuckle] but it worked; it was better than the old attachment on the back of a tractor … hang of a lot better, ‘cause you were sitting and looking at it, when the other way you were looking behind you which was darn difficult.

And that’s just to show the importance of water; I mean, a way back I showed you the one of too much water when we had trouble with excess rainfall. But of course like this last summer, we’ve had a very dry summer which actually suits; we like dry summers as long as we’ve got plenty of water. And where we are we’re lucky – we’re not too far from the Ngāruroro River, and that was putting a well down. You can see the water, it just got into a good flow, and the well is in under there. My dad’s standing there watching myself – I think that’s either me or my brother, David – I think it’s me, and you see the water coming out the top there, flowing round. So that well went down about a hundred and fifty feet, or forty metres. And, you know this last summer was pretty dry, but from our point of view we still had plenty of water. It hardly changed even in dry conditions.

So we’ve got a lot of the orchard under permanent irrigation, which is the little sprinklers, which is much more efficient way but it’s expensive to put in. We still do quite a lot of the orchard with movable aluminium plates which are more labour intensive, but is its the next stage if you’re going into permanent irrigation.

And then to finish off I’ve put a few in … some of you will remember that we used to do floats, natural blossom floats, for the Blossom Festival. Well, when my brother David and I left school and came home my dad had been very keen to buy a twenty-one-acre property next door to us, which he finally managed to do. But he had to pay a very, very high price for it per acre, at the time; it was a record price to get this, because you know, the property right next door to you is always more convenient than cheaper; but he did pay a lot of money for it at the time. and we had some luck go our way as I said, we were growing tomatoes for Wattie’s; we had a very good crop, good summer, [coughing] nice and dry. Because they’d had a huge crop – everybody had a big crop of tomatoes – [and] we were not a regular grower although my dad knew James Wattie before he became Sir, ‘cause he grew up just round the corner from us … he being Sir James Wattie. So the next year we couldn’t get a contract for tomatoes, so Dad got enough potato seed and we planted ten acres of potatoes – they were a variety of Aucklander Short-top which was Sutton. Some of you might remember the old variety – it was a forerunner to Rua. And in those days a lot of table potatoes for the country were grown in Canterbury; nowadays Canterbury tends to grow more just seed potatoes. But there’d been a glut of potatoes; there was [were] potatoes that you could hardly give away, so a lot of folk didn’t bother to grow potatoes the next year, they’d been so hard done by. Dad managed to get some seed of the Sutton variety and thought, ‘Well seeing as we can’t grow tomatoes, we’ll plant potatoes.’ This is in this property next door before we were sort of progressively planting it in trees; and my dad had seen the fact that Granny Smith was such a good apple [and] he felt, you know, there wasn’t enough of them. And the Apple and Pear Board were paying good money for Grannys so we planted ten acres of Grannys eventually, which was a lot in those days.

However, this crop of potatoes … we ended up with a hundred ton of potatoes. That was harvested in 1956, and some of you might remember, we went from one extreme to the other. That year was a famine of potatoes because nobody hardly planted them. We came by luck on this hundred ton of potatoes and he sold them for £100 a ton. We had people coming in off the road begging us, “Please will you sell me a bag of potatoes?” And so from that we were able to just about pay off this property, and buy a decent tractor, ‘cause we’d had the old Case tractor – you might’ve seen the photo towing the sprayer. My brother, David and I made do with gear that was really antiquated, so we were able to buy a decent tractor.

So this float that I’m coming to – we decided we’d have a go at putting a natural blossom float in the procession. So those two girls in the front are twins, and they’re Mardons; their dad had a little orchard down the far end of St Andrews Road … some of you might remember. Their dad was a relative of course, but he was a Second World War pilot in the tail end of the Battle of Britain; came back home to New Zealand and got involved with top dressing. He was one of the pioneers … [?] Mardon … of top dressing with Sherwood’s, and he was a Tiger Moth pilot, ‘cause that’s what they used in those days. So he made enough money to buy this little orchard down the end of St Georges Road. So they’re twin girls, and my sister, Joyce, up the top. Now most of those flowers in here, are anemones – not all – but we glued them onto a cardboard base. [Chuckle] We sort of used hedging to cover the tractor and then put daffodils around it. We did it the evening before, and on the way into town with this big tractor with big lugs on the tyres … bump, bump, bump, bump, bump. [Laughter] All the way into town was a big trail of daffodils. [Laughter] So we learnt … we learnt a lot of things. We got third prize; but it looked all right. So we learnt; and that was the best float that I felt that we ever did. And that was actually pushed – you can’t see there, but my brother, David, is away down in here … underneath there, and he’s steering it with the tiller steering it. There was a young lady sitting here. I didn’t have a photo looking at it from the front, but I was in the little house – and my wife, Sharon – and there’s a little fountain, and I wound a winder with a pump, and that made the water circulate and made the fountain go.

And then we also had a bee smoker [chuckles] with sacking in it, and Sharon, my wife, puffed the smoke out the chimney, [laughter] so every now and then coming down the street there’d be a puff of smoke coming out. [Chuckles] However, as I said, it was it was actually pushed. There was a long pipe rod back here a friend of ours – it was Frank Cooper, some of you’ll know Frank Cooper, the land agent fellow, used to live down Havelock way. And Frank and Kay we knew well; and Frank had a little old Land Rover. Those of you who’ll remember, those [were the] days of George Wilder, [chuckles] famous escape artist they couldn’t keep in. So we decorated this old Land Rover with bits of manuka, and made a little hut inside to cover the cab sort of, and we called it ‘Wilders Lodge’. [Chuckles] And so Frank drove that, and [it was] actually pushed; and he was in communication with a telephone down to David in the front, steering. So we had a lot of fun – we actually had more fun in some ways decorating the old Land Rover than we did with the other. But however, we did learn a lot and we learnt which flowers to put where; those flowers on the roof of the little building, those are camellias and they’re all wired on, you know, the florist wire? [You] push the florist wire through. Started the afternoon before, and then gave it a wee twist – it was on netting. So we had tons of enthusiastic helpers – in fact it became difficult, because we had lots of people that [who] were so enthusiastic … helpers … and they would argue about which flowers, which colours … “Oh no, that colour won’t go there”, [chuckles] “you should put something else.” But the actual flowers didn’t matter, they sort of blended in with one another; it was more a matter of learning which flower to put where. The daffodils with the long stem could go on flat surfaces; they were easy on flat surfaces, but on the wall the stem held them down … the weight of the stem. There’s lachenalia in there; that’s a close up of the daffodils and grape hyacinths.

Question: Did you grow all the flowers?

Phil: No, we didn’t, but we go to the stage where people would offer – they’d ring us up and we’d put them in the cool store. We’d start collecting flowers about a week beforehand, and Dad used to go all around … we had people that came from Central Hawke’s Bay. We had one family actually from Shannon that [who] used to come up and help us and bring flowers from down there. I think the very last float that we ever did, [cough] we had an excess; we had some left over. We used to start … mmm, about lunchtime-ish the Friday before, and I think with ‘The Ladies’ Garden’ one we had it pretty near done by ten or eleven o’clock at night, something like that.

That’s just a shot in the cool store; the old kerosene tins, and all sorts of flowers put in the cool store. And it’s amazing how – especially daffodils – how long they last. I mean, they only had to last that day, and not so much after that.

Question: How did you work out your designs?

Phil: That’s a good question … sort of as we went. [Chuckles] As we went in a way. Had a bit of an idea, and then sort of spend nights in the winter – start in July. My brother-in-law, Don, who’s married to my sister, Joyce, was a carpenter by trade, not that that mattered, but he helped us a lot. So it was just a sort of an idea, then we’d develop it as we went along.

And that’s the very last one that we ever did, and unfortunately I didn’t put in the one of that completed; that was ‘Castles in the Air’, and it was a castley thing up the back, up high, and two girls that [who] worked for us sat in the front. But that’s just starting, and that was a bridgey thing that went up and that was camellias … the white camellias; we must’ve just made the pattern there and filled them in with the red ones … red ones, there were plenty of them around.

Then I just put that on because that was a slide that I had. That was taken in Lawn Road – the traction engine. It’s hard to believe that that would’ve been about the sixties. I would say they were threshing grass seed, probably rye, and you can see there’s a bloke up there in the top feeding it in, and another one there stacking the bags of grass seed just down there. So there’s [a] bit of history there.

And then to finish off I put that in, because that’s taken down at the … well, everybody used to say the Pakowhai river, which it wasn’t really – it was the Ngāruroro River – but at Pakowhai where the old bridge … and the old bridge is still there … where the Country Park is now. That was the favourite swimming hole, and you know on some Sunday afternoons there’d be several hundred people down there. And we used to go down – pester our parents – the days before swimming pools, “Can we go down to the river for a swim?” And there’s a rope over there and a person just swinging off the cliff bank into the water. And in a hot, hot summer, especially like the summer we’ve had, the water would be actually quite, almost warm. But still, it was a marvellous place to go to finish off after a hard day’s work.

And just along a wee bit further down the river there, that’s where the cold stream came in, which is the Tutaekuri-Waimate [Stream] which comes from a way up through Pakowhai, right up to Fernhill. And spring-fed water comes into the river further up … now it’s all changed, but in those days it came into the river down there, and the water coming in was freezing cold. You’d swim across there and get across the cold stream. [Chuckle]

So I think that’s about it; if I could finish off by saying that … yeah, one of the sad things of the industry is that my brother, David, and I were great supporters of the Apple and Pear Marketing Board, and we lost that organisation twelve or thirteen years ago. So we went from single desk marketing of apples, to the next year when the legislation was removed by the government of the day. We went from largely one exporter – there were times when they gave consents to other people to export into places where there was no competition from them – went from that to about ninety exporters. We look at the industries that’ve done so well over the years since then, like the kiwi fruit industry and the dairy industry – the dairy industry is slightly different admittedly – but largely single desk. We’ve got enough competition, we always felt, out there, without competing against ourselves. So we find it sad that back in those days in the sixties, seventies, there was [were] something like about fifteen hundred growers in New Zealand; now there’s about four hundred and fifty, or something like that. But the production is nearly … it did drop a lot but it’s come up a little bit … so we’ve got the advent of big corporate growers, and sadly the demise of a lot of smaller growers. We used to pack, as I said earlier, our own fruit, and pack for about another six or seven growers. They’ve all leased their properties or pulled them out, so that’s one part of the industry that I find sad.

In the days of the Apple and Pear Board it was such a cooperative industry, and Ken Kiddle was a person who I had great admiration for because he helped to develop the cooperative nature of our industry, where everybody helped each other. And I think a lot of that came from the post-war years, when a lot of young people came back from the war; rehab orchardists, settled on rehab blocks [Rehabilitation Act 1941: Assistance and training to acquire farms] – the Grassmere block was one that was cut up. And so there was very much a cooperative spirit. In those days the local market was controlled as well, and there was black marketing went on; that was where we were not allowed to sell to a retailer. Now that side of it was given away and that couldn’t be sustained, we knew that; but from an export point of view it was sad that we lost the single desk marketing.

That’s my opinion, and my brother, David, and there are others in the district too. Whether we’ll ever get back to that I don’t know, but it’s sad to see. There were things about the Apple and Pear Board that were not going right, but instead of fixing them the industry … an old saying, but they threw the baby out with the bath water, and it’s suffered since. And we’ve had difficulties with marketing and the high dollar, and climatic changes as well – to a certain extent, more frosts. This last spring, Labour Weekend, we had a really [cough] nasty frost – we had several others earlier, but we had a very nasty frost, and we got caught very badly. It did a lot of damage to the apple crop. But however, we battle on; we’re optimists and I’ve got a son on the property, he threatens to leave every two or three days [laughter] but he’s still there. So there we are – thank you.

Jim Watt: It’s been a classic morning, hasn’t it? [Audience agreement] Rose is going to give a vote of thanks in a minute; let’s do that.

Rose Chapman: Yes, I’d just like to thank you so much; it’s been a real nostalgic journey for my sister and I – we grew up on a small orchard in Crosses Road, and everything’s just so full of memories for us. I remember I used to get paid a penny a case to paste these labels on each end, yeah. And you could make good money if you spent the whole day at it. [Chuckles] A shilling, or two shillings. This was an identification number for which grower it was … this was to do with the size or the variety?

Phil: Variety.

Rose: And then you put a little stamp on the end to show … I could go on for hours. [Chuckles] It was just wonderful to hear all that, and the Blossom Festival, and I was always so impressed that you made fresh flower floats. So before I finally finish with Philip – I think you should write a book too. Although ‘100 Harvests’ is wonderful, just those little stories about people that you told. So we’re most grateful; thank you very much.

[Applause]