Sunnyfresh was a tomato farm and at the time there were about three acres under glass. We started at eight and finished at six in the evening. I worked Saturdays during school term and then five days during the holidays.
It was interesting seeing the season develop, watching the two leaf seedlings grow to large fruit bearing plants. We were paid sixteen shillings per day, which in today's money would be a little less than a Euro. It kept me in pocket money and I even felt proud to be grown up enough to contribute to the family budget at home.
There was great cameraderie between the diverse range of employees. A lot of the men were elderly, small farmers, who worked there to supplement their income. Others were younger men from the town. The work was hard, especially in the Summer when the weather was hot outside and very humid in the glasshouses themselves.
There were various jobs to be done, watering, weeding, de-leafing, removing sideshoots but mostly it is the picking of the fruit I remember. Racing to see who could get to the end of their path first. The tomatoes were picked when they were yellow-orange in colour and it was important to make sure the green calyx stayed on the fruit. At the end of a day's picking our hands were green and the best thing to clean them was a squashed green tomato. Even with a lot of scrubbing our hands never came fully clean and we were left, each evening, with a brown stain impregnated into our skin. One of the perks, was that we got to take home tomatoes any evening, not that many of us ate them, having looked at them all Summer.
The farm grew by another acre during my time there but when the oil crisis hit in the 1970s it nearly marked the end of the business. It was getting too expensive to heat the glasshouses. There were three managers, an Irish man called Fred Duffy, an English man, Bill Dray and a Dutch man, Jan Moret. I think it was Duffy who got the brainwave to buy up all the waste oil in garages. Mostly they got it free. It was collected in a truck and taken to the farm where it was passed through a long pipe that had a series of sieves or filters built ino it. When the oil came out the end it could be used to heat the glasshouses, for practically nothing. As time passed the managers discovered that they had a surplus so they began to sell it to other businesses. Soon they then realised there was more profit in selling this oil, than burning it, to grow tomatoes. Sunnyfresh was wound up and a national company, Atlas Oil was formed.
The site of Sunnyfresh Farm is now a housing estate and the ghosts of some of the former workers maybe wander through it occasionally.
Two of the lads, Sean and Gerard, that I started with that first morning have since passed on, but I have great memories of us learning to drive the old dumper and tractor and planning camping trips to Rosses Point. We told jokes planned our futures and discussed our favourite music and clothes. Mostly we talked about the girls we danced with at the weekend disco and wondered if any of them would be in the Mayfair Cafe that night.
I have especially warm memories of breakfasts with my father, Jerry, quietly eating porridge and drinking tea, while the rest of the house was asleep.
In all I suppose I worked there for about four years and I have always thought about growing my own tomatoes. This Summer I did. My small house of four plants grew well and the crop yielded lots of small, sweet cherry tomatoes. It is now the end of August and there are still a few trusses to be picked and enjoyed over the coming weeks.
I also grew a few strawberries.
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