Ripeness

On harvest days, our primary task is to determine ripeness. I've been learning a lot about when to harvest certain fruits and vegetables, and how to harvest them most effectively. The farm grows hundreds of varieties of vegetables to as the season has progressed, some crops (like lettuce) are continually harvested while others (like asparagus) come and go. The variety of what I'm harvesting not only changes over the course of the season, but also varies day by day throughout the week. I've therefore managed to acquire a sizable mental catalog of vegetables and their ideal maturity levels for harvest.

As a crew leader at the farm, it is my job to know this information, and also communicate it effectively to the people on my crew. We arrive at a field, and huddle together around a series of cucumbers, for example, and talk about variety type and ripeness. The harvest becomes something very systematic: approach each plant, decide if the fruit is underripe. If it's underripe, leave it to grow. Otherwise take it off the plant and discard it (if it's overripe) or keep it as a part of the harvest if it fits the ideal. Pictured right are discarded pickling cucumbers, blimp-like in their overripeness, but still perfectly edible for in-field snacking!

Cucumbers are one of the crops that will be around for a large chunk of the summer. Just yesterday I helped to put yet another planting of cucumber seedlings into the ground. Other harvests are ephemeral. These momentary harvests are something to savor and I was happy to spend a day leading a pea harvest this week. Earlier in the season I staked and twined the pea plants when they were only a few inches tall. Now their tendrils have wrapped around the twine and they've grown upwards to create long green corridors of pea vines. We picked hundreds of pounds of shelling peas, snap peas, and snow peas. Peas are synonymous with this moment in the early summer when the heat sets in and our favorite summer vegetables start to roll in. Below you can see a crate of snap peas being filled, and a perfectly ripe pod of candy-like shelling peas.