Welcome to a day in the life of a Powisset Farm harvest! Many of you have asked us when your food was picked, why we don’t start our distributions earlier in the day, and, on some occasions, even where the food comes from! Here’s the inside scoop:

Our day begins at 7am when we meet up at the farm office to talk about what’s in the field that day. The whole farm crew is there, and we share our thoughts with each other on what is ready to pick, what’s new to the share that day, how much of each crop we think we can give out that week, and which crop we think that you all might want a break from.

Then we load up Donna (that’s our blue farm truck) with harvest bins, harvest knives, our scale, and harvest notebook and head into the fields. We always start by picking the most wilt-prone veggies first. Typically, that’s lettuce, arugula, chard, kale, or any greens. We want to get all of those leafy items out of the field before the sun is really powerful. We take multiple trips in Donna to bring food up into the cool shade of our wash station. And it’s still morning!

Each harvest day has its own harvest leader. We all take turns being the one in charge of leading the crew through the harvest, reminding us how many heads of lettuce we decided to pick, how many rubber bands we need for the radishes, or whether or not we want to bunch the chard or leave it loose. Everyone works fast and efficiently to get the harvesting done quickly, including our fabulous “workshares.” Our field workshares come on harvest days to lend us a hand throughout the entire harvest. This year we are lucky to have a talented, hard working crew of volunteers who are out there with us rain or shine.

Inevitably, there are occasions during our harvests where we find that we are able to give more than we thought, so we pick more. Or perhaps we find we have less of something than expected, so we pick something else, or save that particular veggie for another week.

Meanwhile, as most of the crew finishes up the picking, one of us is up at our wash station (which is located off the side of the distribution area) dunking and spraying the veggies, and getting the field heat off of them. Once all of the produce on our harvest list is done, we all join that crew member in the wash area and finish washing as a group. Most days we finish this process between 11:30-12, just in time for lunch!

After we eat our lunch and recover from the busy morning of harvesting, we set up the distribution area for the pick-up. We love to arrange the vegetables in beautiful and colorful ways, (and hopefully in a way that will facilitate your pick-up experience).

From there…it’s back to the fields to work on the veggies for next weeks harvest!

See you in the fields,

Meryl, Tara, Melanie, and Amy