legends · 3 min read ·
Harvest Weights
An orchard inspector finds a running tally written on apples, and a picker who is still picking.
**Plant Health Service — Orchard Inspection Report**
**Orchard:** Penhallow Farm, 6 ha, dessert apples (Egremont Russet, Discovery) · **Inspector:** L. Aird · **Date:** 4 October
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**Inspector's findings**
The orchard is well kept. Pruning is good, grass cut, no sign of canker or scab above tolerance. I was asked to look at a bruising complaint that had been logged by the packing house. Fruit from rows 14 to 18 was arriving with dark marks on the skin that the packers could not remove by brushing.
I picked twenty apples from row 16. All twenty had the marks.
They are not bruises. A bruise is a diffuse patch of browned flesh under an intact skin. These are sharp-edged, dark, slightly raised, and set in the skin like print. Each apple carries the same sequence, small marks in a row around the equator. I photographed the twenty apples and laid them out on a bench.
The marks are numbers. Each apple has a three-digit figure, in a plain font, running round the fruit. On twenty apples, the figures read: 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, and so on up to 233.
I cut one open. The core was sound.
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**Packing house note (Penhallow Farm, 5 October)**
We have set aside all marked fruit. There are a lot of apples. By our reckoning, 1,730 apples have come in marked since Monday, each with a different number. The numbers run up from 214. The first apple was 214. The highest so far is 1,943.
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**Weigh-in sheet — Harvest, Row 16 (Penhallow Farm)**
- **Bin · Picker · Gross (kg) · Tare (kg) · Net (kg)**
- 1 · Pickers' team A · 312 · 22 · 290
- 2 · Team A · 308 · 22 · 286
- 3 · Team B · 315 · 22 · 293
- 4 · Team B · 311 · 22 · 289
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**Inspector's follow-up (L. Aird, 12 October)**
I have been trying to find the pattern. Numbers on the apples are not random. They do not repeat. In ten days the pickers have brought in 4,200 marked apples, and I have photographed every fiftieth. The sequence continues without a gap, from 214.
I have checked the farm records. In 1996 there was a storm that took out row 16. The trees were replanted the following spring. The farm owner, Mr Penhallow, says that in the old days the pickers kept a tally of apples by writing on the fruit with a marker before it went in the bin. Nobody has done that for forty years.
I asked how many pickers there were in 1996. He said twenty-one. I asked how many bins were filled on the day of the storm. He said he did not remember. He said nobody was there to fill any.
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**Packing house note (Penhallow Farm, 20 October)**
The numbers have reached 7,000 and they are still coming. We have burned the marked fruit in the yard, in drums. The smoke was sweet and very thick and it lay on the orchard for two days.
Mr Penhallow has gone through the books. He says the number on the first apple, 214, is the number of the row, the tree, and the bin. It is a tally. A tally of apples picked, by hand, on a single day, by one picker, who was working to a count.
He says the count has not stopped. He says she is still picking.
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**Harvest summary (Penhallow Farm, 31 October)**
Bins filled: 60.
Bins sold: 60.
Bins returned by the cider works as unfit: 61.
The farm office has asked me to confirm that the discrepancy is a clerical error. I have checked the weighbridge tickets, the delivery notes, and the bins stacked in the yard. There are sixty bins. I counted them twice.
Bin 61 is at the end of row 16, under the tree. It is full, and marked on the side in chalk, in a neat upright hand, *Net: 290*. It is dry. It is not yet dark. And someone is still picking.