YOUR INDUSTRY
Jono Sutton in the midst of this year’s flowering
Boysenberry harvest a three-generation labour of love Three generations of the Sutton family will be involved in the “organised chaos” of the boysenberry harvest that is about to crank into action on their Nelson orchard. By Anne Hardie Jono Sutton has always associated summer with the frantic pace of the boysenberry harvest, working alongside his father, Stephen, and grandfather, David, to get the berries off the vines at the point they are ready to drop to the ground. And he thrives on it.
sprawl overtook their original Daelyn’s Orchard. Back then, the business was largely selling fruit direct to the public and it was a summer destination for locals and visitors.
Winner of the 2019 Young Grower of the Year competition, Jono is the younger generation on the family’s horticulture enterprise which grows 30 hectares of boysenberries and 30 hectares of apples.
Despite the site shift, boysenberries have remained part of the family’s operation, with a transition to five harvest machines instead of hand picking. For 11 months of the year the machines sit in the shed but come December 15 they are powered up to take the crop off the vines. Jono says the technology for the machines has been around since the 1980s but the newer models still have the same picking apparatus that was designed back then.
Today, Eden’s Road Fruit sits on the Waimea Plains west of Richmond where the family moved the business after urban
A limited window for harvesting means the harvesters are working whenever the crop and weather allow.
“I’m a bit of a freak in the sense that I enjoy being under the pump.”
32
The ORCHARDIST : DECEMBER 2021
