The strawberry season has begun — far later than usual, which isn’t surprising, considering the continuing cool weather.
When the season begins, it always takes me back to one of my first jobs as a young person, and probably one of the toughest jobs I’ve ever had. The job was strawberry picking.
When I was in Grade 8 or 9 (possibly both years), I picked strawberries in the area of Langley that some people still know as Sperling. It was at the time The Beatles came out with “Strawberry Fields Forever,” and it sure felt that way.
Sperling remains a good area for growing strawberries, and the large Driediger Farms operations are located there.
Strawberry picking began in the second week of June or so. That’s usually when the berries ripened, after a combination of rain and some warming weather, combined with very long hours of daylight.
In those days, most of the pickers were high school students like myself, and housewives. Many women with children at home only worked part-time outside the home, and often took advantage of seasonal jobs like picking strawberries, raspberries, pole beans, cucumbers and other crops.
In earlier days, many people also picked hops — not in Langley, where there were no hop farms, but in Chilliwack and Agassiz. My dad picked hops as a young man with his family. They travelled from Surrey to Chilliwack and stayed on the hop farms for some time, until the crop was harvested.
My memories of strawberry picking aren’t too positive. For starters, it was very hard to stay hunched over for most of the day. I found it hard on my back, which got very stiff.
Secondly, it wasn’t easy to pick the berries. While there were plenty on each plant, at that time we were supposed to try and pick them so that the stem wasn’t attached to the berry. That wasn’t easy. I never really did master it.
The third challenge was to avoid the temptation of eating the luscious berries. I was talking about this with another veteran of Langley strawberry fields the other day, and we both agreed that we probably ate as many berries as we picked.
While the beries tasted good, we didn’t get paid for the ones we ate. Nor did the farmer, for that matter. That may have had something to do with the minimal amount of money we made for picking them.
Strawberry pickers were paid by the flat. A flat was 12 good-sized baskets of berries. For those who picked from the beginning of the season right through to the end, they made between $1.20 and $1.40 per flat. For those like me who found it hard to keep doing the work every day (and couldn’t get a ride there every day either), we were paid $1 per flat.
I may have managed to pick four flats in a day, but I doubt it. I think I usually picked two to three flats a day — so made $3 or so for about eight hours work. It was a very tough way to make money.
The good thing about picking strawberries is it helped me to greatly appreciate other jobs. Other farm work I did in later years was far better — I thoroughly enjoyed many of those jobs. And I’ve appreciated every other job I’ve had as well.
