To raise our travel budget, we needed to find a job, and what’s better than kiwi fruit picking in New Zealand?
As we have to finance our sweet green van and all our NZ adventures, we definitely needed to find a job at one point. Fruit picking was on my “to do list” anyways and I was quite happy that our first job turned out to be kiwi fruit picking 🥝😀. On the first day I was exited to pick kiwi fruits, all days later I was fine with it as it was good money.
We started to work for the company Prokiwi and were placed in the so called “backpacker crew”. Altogether we were about 10 people in one crew. We were all meant to pick kiwi fruits as a team. We loaded them in the same bins and at the end of the day, the amount of picked bins was divided through the number of working people. Good teamwork! At least most of the time… Well, sometimes there were days with motivated people in our team and on others it seemed as the motivation has left everybody in the crew 😅.
All in all, we liked kiwi fruit picking. It was an exhausting job but nevertheless, we had a few breaks in between and the calculated hourly rate was good when the crew was motivated. It was quite annoying though that we weren’t allowed to pick kiwi fruits on rainy days and therefore, work was cancelled a few times. We definitely couldn’t talk about normal, organized work hours and whoever is looking for them, you shouldn’t be kiwi fruit picking. In the mornings, we often woke up to look on our phones which displayed the text message “Kiwi fruit still wet, delayed start”. If we were really unlucky, a few text messages would follow, pushing the start time off a few more times and sometimes, work got even cancelled for the whole day. Most of the time we waited in the van while making pancakes, but to be honest, these texts were really annoying.
Most of our days off due to several reasons as bad weather or a full packhouse, we spend in Tauranga. Often together with Leonie and her boyfriend Dan. Leonie was a very nice member of our kiwi fruit picking crew 😊. As our van does not have an integrated shower and nothing feels better than a hot shower after a whole day of kiwi fruit picking, Leonie had offered us to shower at her place. Super sweet and we were happy to take her offer! Thanks again!
