What can I say? It’s hard to believe that our first CSA season is already drawing to a close. It has been a whirlwind and so exciting to share the harvest with our members. But I will save reflecting on the season for my final note next week.
We are still hard at it harvesting pumpkins and will continue to do so straight through Halloween. Pumpkin harvesting is fun and fast paced, especially when it is a great pumpkin season like this year. The fields are loaded with pumpkins and harvesting goes quickly. We call the process cutting and rowing. The pumpkins are cut off the vine and placed in rows, the truck pulling the wagon is then driven in between the rows and the pumpkins are tossed from the field up to the wagon and placed in the bins. It is a manual process, but the bins fill up quickly and we can get a lot done in a day. Using wagons that hold 16 bins, with each bin holding about 40 pumpkins, it takes about 15 minutes to fill up each wagon load. We are averaging about 120 bins of pumpkins harvested each day.
It is definitely nice to have only a few crops to harvest during the day this time of year, the stress is starting to ease up and we are starting to get a bit more sleep at night. We will push on through the next two weeks and soon we will begin the groundwork for Pahl Farms CSA 2015!
Have a great share week!
-Cole Moldenhauer
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