Rose-picking

Rose-pickers are early birds and in May the whole valley smells like roses. That’s all we knew before we left for the small village of Yagoda and the gardens where the roses for our rose syrup are grown.

Yagoda village, Alteya Organics

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Rose-pickers are early birds and in May the whole valley smells like roses. That’s all we knew before we left for the small village of Yagoda and the gardens where the roses for our rose syrup are grown.
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Alteya Organics distillery is at the end of the Yagoda in the valley between two mountains where the world-famous Bulgarian roses are grown. Here are 12 hectares of rose alleys from which Alteya makes its organically certified cosmetic products. A small part of the rose flowers we buy to make our harmonica rose syrup.
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This is Kaloyan, he is one of the owners, and also a good friend of ours. We know how much he loves what he does. Now that we are here, we can see clearly why upon completing his degree in Ethnography in Sofia University, he decided to come back to his homeland and turn the abandoned family fields into rose gardens. Because life is much more authentic here. And smells better than the city.
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On the fields and in the distillery work never stops. But now is the busiest time of the year. These are the twenty days when all the roses should be picked and turned into rose oil and rose water. Then things can slow down a little since “rose oil is like whiskey, it has no expiry date” as our host Kaloyan explains.
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This kind of roses have been selected for 60 years so that nowadays it’s the most enduring plant that gives the greatest amount of oil. Generally it’s been a tough year, but Alteya gardens have given more flowers. The average for a plant is to have 25-30 flowers, theirs give up to 70. But people eager to pick them are hard to find and the producers from the whole valley compete for each and every worker.
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We are here to help and right before sunset some last instructions for the next morning are given. It turns out that we don’t have to wake up that early. We can come even at 9 am and there still will be roses for picking.
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We are not in a hurry to leave. The lawn in front of the distillery is covered with “drops” of rose rain that turns the girls into “rose princesses”.
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It’s 7 am the next morning and the chief of the brigade meets us in the gardens. His men and women are here since dawn.
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A brief instruction about the rose-picking and we are given a big plastic bag. “So you can finish a whole row on your own, right?” he asks. How could we know, we are absolute beginners.
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The sun is up and the roses bloom in real time. What’s been a bud a few hours ago is now a flower that has to be picked quickly or it’s gonna fell apart in a few more hours.
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It turned out rose-picking is 3 in 1 – a morning yoga, aromatherapy and meditation. On top of that it’s not you who pays for the treat but you are paid for the pleasure.
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Two hours later the row of roses is finished. The big plastic bag is only half full. Bodies hurt here and there and the stomachs remind us that we skipped breakfast this morning.
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The scales have the final word. We are told that the workers pick circa 40-50 kilos per person every day. “No way” we shake heads and double-check what the scales say.
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Our small brigade had in total around 9 kilos of rose flowers. “Urban guys, what else can you expect” would be the comment of our host Kaloyan, should he had seen the outcome of our early morning efforts. Good for us that he left for Sofia the night before to be a best man at a wedding.
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But we are more than proud of our humble accomplishment and the breakfast after was one of the most tasty we have ever had.
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Next year we are coming with a real brigade and you’ll see.
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