THE pressure is now on for the Jersey Young Farmers Club, who in just six days time will need to have completely finished building and painting their float, and have done the majority of their harestailing work.

The following day the team’s flowers will arrive and from then on it will be a case of all hands on the glue guns to ensure that their exhibit – Jersey Young Farmers Chaos – will be ready in time for Battle.

‘Next Thursday is the absolute last day that we have to have finished building the float because our flowers arrive on the Friday,’ said their Battle chairman Emily Ryan. ‘I hope that we will have definitely finished painting on that day as well. Most of our harestailing also needs to be done, but it is not so much of an issue if it’s not – although it does mean that we would loose a flowerer until it was finished.

‘Friday is the day that the flowers arrive but it’s turning out to be a bit of a nightmare because most of our team are at a wedding on that day and everyone else is at work.’

Emily said that once the young float builders have surmounted the problem of dealing with the floral delivery, it will be a case of unpacking the thousands of stems as quickly as possible and getting them in water so they can finish opening up. Flowering the float will then begin on the Sunday before the parade.

‘At the moment the float itself is going well,’ said Emily. ‘The structure is getting there. We need to get our last speaker fitted and then we can get the skirt on. We have built our emergency trap door around the side and we have already started papering around the joins.

‘We have used hardly any metal for our structure this year. It has been mostly wood so that has saved us so much money and time. We have still had to use it for a few things though, for example the chicken.’

So, have the team encountered any problems since we last caught up with them? ‘Harestailing was going fine until the pig was finally finished and we realised how big he actually was,’ said Emily. His head and hands need harestailing in pink but the rest of him is ok as he will be wearing a black suit for which we will use black flowers. But the head is one foot by one foot in size.

‘The rest of the harestailing is coming along well though; the set piece – a horse – is nearly finished. We’ve got hold of real horse hair which has added a great touch to it. However, the side of the horse was going to be dark red and bright red but we may not have ordered enough of those colours so may have to have an alteration.

‘We have also encountered an unexpected cost recently. We borrowed flowers from a float last year and they’ve just asked us for the £200 for them. It’s our own fault though as we should have paid it last year.’

And despite receiving numerous phone calls as a result of a JEP plea for pampas grass, Islanders have failed to come up trumps and provide the club with the plant, meaning that they are now going to have to find a different way of decorating their chicken. ‘We spoke to a florist too and she couldn’t get any either so I think we are going to have to accept that it is a no hoper,’ said Emily. ‘We are now considering using feathers or cotton wool. We have already ordered 600 feathers off eBay which will be used to cover our duck, as its saves us having to flower or harestail it.’

When we last caught up with them, the club were preparing to learn their dance. However, delays have meant that this has only just begun.

‘We plan to have 14 girls dancing and around ten guys dotted around the float,’ said Emily. ‘We will be practising the dance right up to Battle day itself. Last year we didn’t start learning it until the day before so we are already ahead. ‘We have now ordered all of our dresses and our bloomers are coming on well, although my Mum had to go to Guernsey to get some patterns to make them.’

The club have also decided to try out a number of new materials on their exhibit this year.
‘Our barn roof is going to have sticks on it so that it looks like a real roof,’ said Emily. ‘It would have cost much more in flowers. We have also fitted a real pond in the back of the float with water. We have not decided yet whether to have real fish in it or not though.’

Emily added that the team members who can do so have also increased the time that they are spending working on the float. ‘A few of us are going up in the day now,’ she said. ‘I work in a school and a couple of our members are teachers so we are all on summer holidays and another of our members has just come back from travelling.

‘We are getting there now but I am getting really nervous about the whole thing. There is always something on my mind. I am not getting much sleep at the moment as there is a lot of pressure for everything to go well.’
l In the next instalment: Will everything be finished in time for the arrival of the flowers and will the girls master their dance in time for the parade?

Miss Battle of Flowers Holly Fraser, a member of the club, has been helping the girls with the dance routines.