Every year, early in the season, our crew watches an old video, Efficient Harvesting Techniques, made by CSA Works (Food Bank Farm) in Hadley, MA. It’s no longer available, sadly (Michael Docter says “We’ve retired from the film industry to do farming!”). The film has cult movie status with us, and old hands join in on key punch lines. It’s packed with good information. It took me many screenings before I no longer took away a new tip each time I watched. Much of what we have learned is from them. According to Vern Grubinger in his book Sustainable Vegetable Production from Start-Up to Market at Food Bank Farm, “On an average day, 5,000 pounds of produce is brought in by noon by five people working for seven hours each. That works out to nearly 145 pounds per hour per person.”

Aside from learning from Food Bank Farm, we have also compiled our own tips for harvesting crews, which I describe below. Another good resource is Roxbury Farm’s detailed Harvest Manual; see page 20 for more information.

Planning
The seed for smooth, efficient harvesting is sown before the season starts, when you plan your field layout and review your equipment. It’s good to have the giant winter squash, pumpkins and watermelons near a road, or at least a path wide enough for a garden cart, if not a truck. Plant long rows with access gaps every hundred feet (thirty meters) or so, to reduce the distance you need to carry heavy loads.

Our mixed system of beds and row crops means that small plantings of delicate crops are always located where we will pass by them often. (Permaculturists call this close-at-hand area Zone 1). It is poor planning to have your lettuce at the bottom of a long field, “over the horizon” from the top of the row.

Plant tall but closely spaced crops (corn, broccoli) in pairs of rows so that one person can pick two rows for the same amount of travel distance. This works best for crops where each plant offers up only one piece for harvest at a time. With peppers, tomatoes, beans and the like, we find it more efficient to pick just one row at a time, or else the picker “loses their place” and has to scan over the plant again when switching from one row to another.
Don’t put time into harvesting more of a crop than you need — aim to have the right amount coming in each week.

Organization
Before you set out to the field, make a picking list and gather the containers and knives you will need. Watch the weather forecast — harvest more or sooner if a big rain is coming, and preemptively pick crops that should not be handled when the leaves are wet.

Plan who will pick each crop. It is often more efficient to have regular crew members specialize in certain crops. This can give job satisfaction from the sense of competency, and routines can help trained workers know what to expect and so take initiative appropriately. On the other hand, cross-training is important, so pairing up a newbie with an experienced person makes the crew more resilient. Explain the signs of maturity: have people gently squeeze eggplant of different sizes, for instance. I recently learned from the High Mowing catalog that cabbage is fully mature when the biggest leaf on the head (not the loose outer leaves) curls back on itself. I had struggled for years to explain exactly how I was determining maturity — paleness of the center, firmness, size? I couldn’t clearly say how I knew! The curling back leaf is a simple sign, easy to explain.

We generally divide our harvest into three categories: daily, three times a week and twice a week. How often you need to harvest each crop will depend on its shelf life as well as your markets. Daily harvests include salads, okra, cucumbers, zucchini and summer squash, and also topping up supplies of potatoes and sweet potatoes from storage, according to the season. In cooler climates than ours it is probably not necessary to harvest okra or “zukes and cukes” daily. Other growers recommend daily harvesting of corn, but we find no problem with over-maturing when we pick every other day.
For the every-other-day crops we have developed an ingenious phonetic system. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday we harvest crops beginning with a k/c/g sound; on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday we harvest b and p crops. This works almost perfectly, with just a few crops we force into place: eggPlant not eGGplant! sPinach, senPosai! This system works well for us, and adds some amusement. It also ensures we harvest some cooking greens each day: kale, collards, cabbage some days, broccoli, pak choy, spinach on the other days. Beans take over from peas as the spring heats up. Corn gets picked on the days we don’t pick labor-intensive beans.

The twice-a-week crops include some with a reasonable shelf life, like peppers, and those that are at the end of their season when production has dropped off. At some times of year we have once-a-week harvests, such as winter squash in September and October. Blue flags mark which bed of spinach, kale or lettuce to pick next. We always pick a whole bed, to save confusion. We move the flag after harvesting, in a clockwise rotation (bird’s eye view, not earthworm’s!) round the area of raised beds. Spinach and kale are fall, winter and early spring crops here. We harvest by the leaf, and aim to give each bed a week between pickings to regrow.

Potatoes, sweet potatoes, garlic and onions mature all at once and need to be bulk harvested as the major task for the day (or several days) after the regular harvesting is done.

Sequence
Temperature considerations are a major factor in deciding the order to harvest crops in. All leafy greens and corn benefit from cooling as soon as possible after picking. Pick these before the day heats up, and when the cart or truck has just enough room left, so that a trip to the cooler follows loading of the most perishable crops.

Other crops, including cucurbits (cucumber, squash, melons), tomatoes and beans, need to wait until any dew has dried from the leaves before working with them, to minimize the spread of disease. In the summer we find our enthusiasm to harvest early (and finish early before it gets too hot) has to be tempered by the dew point. On dewy mornings we’ll often start with what we call “the aerobic segment” of the shift — any physically taxing work like shoveling, spreading compost or hoeing rather than harvesting.

Avoid harvesting in midday during extremely hot periods. Roots and fruits can be harvested in the afternoon and stored overnight for the next day’s sales.

In winter, nitrate accumulation in leafy vegetables is a health issue, and a reason to delay harvest of greens until the sun has been up for at least four hours.

Management
Every day, one of our most experienced people acts as crew honcho. The honcho makes the pick list, matches people with crops to pick, and then tries to ensure a smooth, happy and efficient harvest. She or he shows the workers good techniques, sets the pace, creates a pleasant atmosphere, and appreciates the workers.

The honcho keeps an eye on who has picked where, when the cart is full, and if more buckets are needed. They make sure no one leaves tools or buckets of produce behind (yes, it has happened). They also make the decision on whether a plot is worth returning to next time, or is finished, and pass this message on to the other honchos.
It is important to recognize that teaching is part of the job, and will help provide the world with more farmers. The honcho trains pickers as needed and, importantly, watches to see if any worker needs remedial training. This is easiest when working alongside or across the row. Often I find it best to fine-tune my instructions, once people learn the basics, rather than giving a deluge of detail at the beginning. Some useful phrases if things go wrong are: “Oh dear, that’s not what I meant” or “I see I didn’t explain that clearly enough.”

Get people to start as far from the road as possible, so when the bucket is full they’ll be nearer the road. When picking long rows, we mark the place we started or left off, for example to take a full bucket to the cart. The Sign of the Crossed Beans (two beans laid across one another on the ground) is one of our favorites, or a big ripe strawberry in the path, depending on the crop. If for some reason we can’t finish one of the big harvests (tomatoes for instance) on a particular day, the next time we pick them we start at the opposite end of the patch, hoping we can pick it all, but using a fail-safe system in case it is again too much.

Keep yields up by sowing often enough — how many times do you want to pick the same bean plants? It depends on the cost of labor and how much land you have. Pick newer plantings before older ones of the same crop to reduce the spread of disease. If you have enough after picking the younger sowing, you can stop picking the old planting and till it in.

On Saturdays we harvest some crops smaller than usual to avoid Monday Monsters: zucchini and summer squash, of course, and also okra (we take Sundays off). If some labor-intensive crops (peas, beans, tomatoes, herbs) are getting away from you, you could consider allowing or encouraging U-pick for them, or calling in the Society of St. Andrew, a volunteer group who glean to feed the hungry.

Weekly scouting will help you to plan when the harvest of each planting will start and end. Records from previous years can provide expected start and end dates — keep these dates in a convenient place where you don’t have to search for them.

Tools of the trade
We use Garden Way-type carts, sometimes a pickup truck, and lots of five-gallon buckets. Customize your buckets — we have some with holes drilled in the bottom. We keep these and the undrilled ones separate, so we can easily find buckets to hold water or to drain washed produce in, as needed. Train your crew not to pour from a full wash bucket into a holey one (greens with grit sauce), but to lift the produce out of the gritty water and put it in the holey bucket. We also have small “berry buckets” we have made from cut-down plastic one-gallon  jugs, with rope loop handles. Long roped ones go round the neck to free up both hands for picking blueberries or cherry tomatoes. Short handled ones go over the wrist or are moved along the ground, for strawberries, snap peas and snow peas. Some crops do better in shallow or ventilated crates rather than in deep airless buckets. We use sheets of plastic Bubble Wrap as cushions in the crates we use for slicing tomatoes. Open-topped backpacks are another idea for a harvest container. They are more ergonomic than carrying a heavy bucket on one side.

Small tools are easily lost, so find some kind of portable container to take to the field. The Universal Container, the five-gallon bucket, is often the answer. We have made a pouch for our pruners with the exact number of pockets for the number of pairs, making it less likely we will walk away leaving tools on the ground. Although special harvest knives can be bought, and we have some of those, we get most of our knives at yard sales and thrift stores. Great value for the money! Serrated bread knives can be excellent tools for cutting cabbage and kohlrabi. We use pruners to harvest okra, eggplant and winter squash, and scissors for spinach leaves.

We have size cards to hang from the okra-harvesting pruners to eliminate questions about whether an okra is large enough. To protect arms against spiny crops like okra, CSA Works suggests cheap crew socks with the toes cut out.
Some kind of barn, packing shed or staging area makes a useful headquarters for communication, especially if supplied with a chalkboard, bulletin board, and perhaps a stand-up desk, and, hmm, maybe cell phones? For ideas on the layout of packing sheds see Healthy Farmers, Healthy Profits, bse.wisc.edu/hfhp/tipsheets_pdf/shed4web.pdf .
As the day draws to a close, you might need a pond, river or outdoor solar shower, followed by some shade trees and a hammock.
   
Harvesting whole heads
For leafy greens, we have three main ways of harvesting: heads, leaf-by-leaf, and “buzz-cutting.” We cut whole heads of mature crops such as cabbage, lettuce, heading oriental greens (napa Chinese cabbage, pak choy, Maruba Santoh, Yukina Savoy, tatsoi), and older spinach. We bend the head to one side, cut through the stem, trim off a few outer leaves if needed, and put the heads in a bucket or crate. With crops that tend to become bitter in warm weather, such as lettuce and broccoli, we require the harvester to break off a piece and taste test for bitterness, rejecting culls in the field. In late spring and early summer, we cut celery bunches about an inch (2.5 cm) above the ground, which allows secondary bunches to develop later. Crops that wilt quickly are set like a bunch of flowers in the bucket, initially held on its side, making it easy to add an inch (2.5 cm) of water when the bucket is full. We do this with celery, chard, Russian kale, turnip greens, mustard greens and also leeks.

Harvesting leaf-by-leaf
For many leafy crops, we extend the harvest period by harvesting leaf-by-leaf. For adolescent lettuce, arugula and young spinach plants, we cut individual leaves or several leaves in one snip, using the all-metal hand-forged Chinese scissors from Lee Valley. At the same time, we snip off old yellowed leaves. I like to cut the leaf stems near the main stem, allowing the new leaves to spread for maximum sunlight and preventing a “cage effect” from near-vertical stalks. With bigger leaves, such as chard, collards, kale, senposai and adolescent oriental greens (Yukina Savoy, Tokyo Bekana, Maruba Santoh), we snap leaves off. To avoid over-picking, we tell harvesters to count the leaves from the center outwards and leave “eight for later” — the eight youngest leaves in the center of the plant.

Buzz-cutting
A quicker variation on cutting a few leaves at a time is what we call “buzz cutting” — giving the plant a crew cut. When the plants are growing fast or we’re short on time, we do this with mizuna, spinach, lettuce mix and arugula. Simply gather the leaves of the plant into a bunch and, using scissors or a sharp knife, cut above the growing point, so the plant can continue growing. During the winter, we often cut our hoophouse mizuna and tatsoi on one side of the plant only, leaving the remaining leaves to make the most of the limited light available.

Roots and alliums
How you harvest roots and alliums depends on your equipment and the scale of your farm. For example, with carrots, you can mow or tear off the tops, then undercut with machinery, then lift. Or you can use the tops to help get the carrots out of ground, as we do, loosening them with a digging fork, then trim. When we harvest carrots for immediate use, we snap the tops off right at the junction of the foliage and the root. When we harvest for storage, we trim with scissors to leave a small length of greens. We don’t do bunched carrots. If you do, you’ll know to band them and wash, keeping the greens in good condition. For tiny roots, like radishes and baby turnips, we harvest directly into a small bucket of water, after trimming tops and tails. This way the roots wash themselves during harvesting and very little cleaning needs to happen afterwards.

We plant our early scallions in bunches, which makes for quicker transplanting and easier harvesting: we loosen the soil, pull up the bunches, band them, trim the roots off, trim the tops with scissors, wash, then stand the scallions in small buckets with water.

It is important to avoid bruising of alliums and fruits — it may be invisible at the time, but cause trouble later. Onions dropped a foot or more suffer interior bruising. Don’t cram too much into one container: this causes bruising too, and reduces air circulation.

Fruits and pods
When picking peas, beans, tomatoes and peppers, we encourage harvesters to use two hands, and use their eyes to look ahead. Because we deliver our peas and beans directly to a kitchen, we trim the pods as we pick. Once we have gathered a handful of pods, we break off the stem end caps before dropping the pods in a bucket. While we are doing this trimming, we look back to see if any have been missed. We pick and discard over-mature pods.

We pick our cucumbers by encircling the cucumber with the hand and pushing against the stem with the thumb. This helps reduce scratches (to the cucumber, not to the harvester, unfortunately!) For zucchini and summer squash we use knives, being careful not to accidentally cut other parts of the plant. We harvest cantaloupes at “full slip,” when the melon leaves the vine after a little nudge. The degree of “nudge” varies a bit, depending on the person harvesting. Some people separate ripe watermelon from the vine with their bare hands, but I prefer using pruners or scissors.
Corn is another crop we trim in the field, because we deliver within the half-hour direct to the cooler in our kitchen. We shuck the corn, throwing the husks back on the ground right there in the patch. This has several advantages, the chief one being the immediate feedback for the harvester on whether the ear has reached full maturity. It also saves cooler space and keeps the soil nutrients removed from the plot to a minimum. Our field trimming produces “kitchen ready” crops, saves time later, and reduces the number of times the crop is handled. Obviously, this technique won’t work for most growers, but it is an example of tailoring harvesting techniques to fit the uniqueness of the market.

Food safety concerns
As we all know, it is important to avoid bacterial contamination. Wounds and abrasions can lead the crop to pick up new bacteria from the environment. Crops can be punctured by the sharp edges of containers as well as the more obvious knives and fingernails.

At the washing station, crops may be washed by spraying down on a mesh table, or by dunking in troughs or buckets of clean water. Not all crops require washing: for some, such as basil and zucchini, it is a poor idea, as quality suffers.
Draining is important. Some crops can drain on a mesh table or in a holey bucket, suspended mesh bag or laundry basket. On a field trip with local growers, I learned a method of filling a laundry basket with salad crops, hanging it from a tree, and twirling it round to spin out the water. No electricity! Barrel root washers and salad spinners have the draining stage built in.

After washing — or perhaps before — comes cooling (washing itself can also act to cool the crop). Make full use of all possibilities, such as damp burlap, high-percentage shade cloth, or the shade of trees, buildings, or a truck. In the shed, setting buckets or crates of produce on a concrete floor will keep them cooler than on tables, especially if the floor is splashed with water periodically.

Pam Dawling is the garden manager at Twin Oaks Community in Louisa County, Virginia. The gardens supply all the fresh produce for the community’s 100 residents. Her book, Sustainable Market Farming: Intensive Vegetable Production on a Few Acres, will be published in February 2013. www.newsociety.com/Books/S/Sustainable-Market-Farming.