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Southland Times, Issue 18965, 13 June 1923, Page 6

A good deal of the best land belonging to the hospital reserve at Northcote is used for strawberry growing, and on Wednesday, when the members of the board visited the place they were struck by the amount of work some of the growers are putting into the cultivation of their plots, states the Auckland Star. Lime is being freely used, and planting is going on at a great rate. Quite a number of Maori women and children were seen engaged at the work and showed themselves to be very expert at it. “There is nothing very easy about strawberry growing,” said one veteran grower, who said he was now nearly three score years and ten, and had been engaged at the work for a few decades. He and his son had planted about; 2000 plants in a day, and that meant some back-bending. He had about 50,000 plants in for this coming season, and he will soon have 70,000 in. One young grower, who had a lot of hands employed, when asked how straw-berry-growing paid, said that if the board would only give him a reasonable lease of, say, four acres of land for twenty years, he thought in that time he would have made enough to retire on. Some of the leases of the land held by the growers will soon be up, but the chairman of the board assured the lessees that they would get a “square deal” when the land was again put into the market. Some of the longer leases for years were at a very small rental. This, of course, would not continue, because the land was increasing in value every day.