Pumpkin and Squash Seed Harvesting
The week
before Thanksgiving finds the farm still buzzing with activity. Trying to get everything wrapped up before the ground freezes keeps us busy in the not-so-pleasant weather of November. Much of our time this week has also been directed toward the cucurbit (pumpkins and squash) seed-harvest.
A local
farmer here in mid-Maine grows several squash and pumpkin varieties for us;
here’s a shot of bins full of fruit being delivered to us prior to processing.
The fruits
are loaded onto a hay elevator and
dumped into our vine crop harvester.
where they are crushed to release their seeds. Here’s a shot of the end of the
vine harvester where the pulp comes out.
Once the
seed depth has built up, we take the seed out of the collector on the vine seed
harvester, for processing it in the coner.
This machine has rubber paddles inside, which, when injected with large amounts of water, gently wash the pulp from the seeds.
As you can
see, it’s a wet job, with water going in every direction!
Here’s the
business end of the coner and the washed seeds coming out.
The seed mixture is comprised of seeds, pulp, and a few rind pieces. All
the seed is collected, whether it be good, plump seed or flat seed that isn’t
good. It is all placed on our paddle
dryer and dried down to where it can safely be stored whilst waiting for
seed cleaning to begin.
Here’s the
seed being agitated and dried.
Once the seed is dried it goes into our controlled atmosphere storage.
After being
cleaned on one or more of our seed
cleaning machines, it gets a final inspection on a “Bean Table.” A bean table is a small table fitted out with
a belt that carries seeds (originally beans; hence the name) along in front of
a person, to be visually inspected. The small boxes on either side are for holding
broken, dirty, or otherwise subprime seeds that are being taken out. The good
seeds drop into a bucket and, when the batch is done, are sewn up and put back
into seed storage.
And that
wraps that up — well, 20-something varieties — and we’re done harvesting.
Aside from that, we’re trying to pull all the plastic from the fields that we can,
before freeze-up. There may be warmer weather for pulling it in the spring, but
that would be leaving one more job undone for the spring, and we’ve got enough
to do that time of year. It’s nice to get it all pulled up before we’re done
for the season — sort of a closing task to the season.
There are a
lot of other projects we can do around the farm before winter, but I’m sure we
won’t get to them all. There are a few trees that need to be taken down, and
some limbs to be trimmed off. Getting as much equipment gone through and stored
under cover is always a challenge. And we’re getting our hoophouses planted for
our overwintering crops — we’ll have fresh succulent greens in March.
Spring is
closer than we think!
Until next time,
—Brian
11/16/2012 — Albion, Maine
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