Tossing pumpkins

Summer is indeed ending, and with it goes the last of the summer vegetables—the tomatoes, the cucumbers, the zucchini. As those plants yield the last of their bounty, vegetable farmers throughout Columbia County are turning toward the fall harvest.

At Katchkie, the winter squash—pumpkins, acorn squash, butternut squash, and a host of others I’d never seen before—are all in a patch at the end of one of the fields, all planted together and mixed in with each other.

Since winter squash is usually very heavy and very bulky, our normal method of dragging bins around and filling them with whatever we’re harvesting wasn’t going to work so well. (Just picture an attempt to fit pumpkins into a plastic bin that is usually used to collect cucumbers and beets—we’d fit maybe two of them in each. Not very efficient.)

So we spent the day playing “toss the squash”: while Nancy (one of the farm’s Mexican workers) clipped the squash off the vine and then tossed it to me, I stood there catching squash and dropping it in the back of the farm’s motorized golf cart. A little nerve-racking for this ex-geek who could never catch a dodge ball, but I had to admit that it was easier (and infinitely more fun) than the alternative scenario of bending over, picking up pumpkins, and hauling each to the car by our own leg power.

Periodically I also had the distinct pleasure of moving the cart among the squash rows, every once in awhile driving over a rotten specimen that no-one had bothered to move with a sickening, but rather satisfying, splat. This portion of the day further extended the joy of my new opportunity to indulge in childish pursuits.

When the cart was full, we hauled the entire load over to a large wooden bin (probably about four feet square), and transferred the squash into the bin. Then it was back to the squash patch to start the process all over again.

We spent the entire day this way, filling four big wooden bins and then, for good measure, about two dozen vegetable bins with tiny pumpkins. The pictures below do not show those little guys.