Bunches

Every Friday on the farm is harvest day for the very popular (and profitable) Saturday farmer's market, located about an hour away on the coast. Also packed on Friday are wholesale restaurant orders, which are taken into town on the same trip to cut down on transportation costs (which consequently lowers the cost of product for individual and retail buyers alike, making organic food both more appealing and more accessible to a wider array of consumers). When the harvest for the weekend trip is too large to accomplish in one day, we begin early on Thursday with the hardier vegetables, which in the case of today was scallions.

Pictured here is the haul from this afternoon (70 bunches were prepared of the needed 100) with the washing sinks behind them. We have a 3 stainless steel sink set-up that allows for triple rinses of produce once harvested from the fields. For scallions, the process is as follows:
1. dig out scallion bunch including roots, remove dirt, separate individual onions (whose roots grow together in the soil and thus must be pulled apart)
2. hose down to remove large clumps of dirt
3. remove rotted or incomplete leaves
4. trim roots to an aesthetic quarter inch or so
5. bunch a good handful with a rubber band and rinse with hose again
6. transport to packing shed to soak and rinse in successive sinks of water
The process is very effective for yielding large quantities of healthy and beautiful-looking (not to mention delicious) green onions.

Harvest is done only a day or two prior to delivery/market because this particular farm has chosen not to use long-term storage of any kind, including refrigeration. This ensures an exceedingly fresh product no matter what. On this farm, the maximum amount of time a scallion spends out of the ground before reaching the buyer's hands is at most 36-48 hours.