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| Menands Farmers Market |
My Uncle Harry was a
tomato, corn, bean, and cucumber farmer. He could plant the vegetables and pick most of the sweet corn, snapping the ears off the stalks and putting 52* ears into a burlap
bag. Some tomatoes, corn, and
cucumbers were sold on a roadside stand in front of his house on Route 20 at
the top of Lord's Hill. Every day, he would load his pickup truck with the morning's pickings and go to the Menands Farmers Market (http://www.capitaldistrictfarmersmarket.org), a wholesale farmers' market, but retail customers were allowed in. He frequently had standing orders
from some of the food wholesalers who had their facility at the market, but
he always sold everything he brought.
Harry needed help picking beans and cucumbers since they
were small and sold in bushel baskets. His solution: child labor. Certainly, in the
late 1940s and early 1950s, there were no migrant laborers to pick these crops in
our area, but there were schoolchildren with nothing to do for the summer.
Every morning during picking season, Harry would pick up boys
and girls in the back of his pickup truck and take them to one of his fields to
pick. Picking beans was quite labor-intensive because it took so many of them to fill up a bushel basket for which
we were paid fifty cents per bushel.
Harry would walk through the fields and check the bushels to see they were filled a little over the top. He would then carry the bushels to the end of
the row, where he would affix the cover. Some workers would sometimes try to cheat by stuffing some of
the bean plants into the bushel to fluff it up. Once, Gerry Plumb put a rock in the basket to make it feel heavier, but
when Harry discovered it, Gerry was forever banned. It was hot work in the summer, but for many, it was the only chance to make a few dollars. I
used to bring a thermos of ice water, but my sister Sylvia and my mother
joked about that and called me "Gunga Din."
Picking tomatoes was easier than picking beans, but
the pickers had to be careful to pick tomatoes that were properly ripe and not
green or overripe. Once in a while, some
of the pickers would get into tomato fights with overripe tomatoes, but that
didn't last long because Harry could easily figure out who the culprits were
and threatened to ban them as pickers if there was a reoccurrence.
Cucumbers were not hard to pick, but the varieties that
were grown then did not have the smooth skin we find in the supermarkets
today. Instead, they were covered with
tiny spines that stung the hand. Every
day, after picking, Harry would sort the cucumbers according to size. The smaller the "cukes," the higher the price
per bushel. No one really wanted the
very large cucumbers, and we were instructed not to put them in the baskets
when we picked them.
After the morning picking was over, Harry paid everyone in
cash and drove them back to where he had picked them up. After the pickers had been driven home, Harry
would load up his pickup truck and head to the market.
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| Typical Strawberry Planting |
My Uncle Max grew strawberries in a large field near his home, between Jack's Place and Harry's home. Unlike other crops, which were annuals, strawberries usually needed a
second year to yield well and didn't have to be planted every year. Also, unlike most other summer crops,
strawberries were planted as young plants purchased from a commercial grower. Max had a tow-behind strawberry planter, and
on some occasions, my father and I would help Max with the planting. Max drove the tractor in a straight line at
slow speeds, and my father and I would sit on a flat seat, almost touching the
ground. We would each have a box of
young berry plants, and as the tractor pulled us forward, a small plow would
open a shallow furrow. We would take
turns placing the young plants into the furrow, with the spacing controlled by
the tractor's speed. At the back of
the strawberry planter, there were two metal wheels set at an angle to each other,
and they would close the furrow, thus planting the berries.
Strawberries were a June crop. In addition to picking strawberries, at ten cents per quart, Max would sometimes hire me to sell
strawberries at a wooden stand that he built on the side of Route 20, right
next to the strawberry field. Berries were sold for fifty cents a quart, and business was always brisk because
everyone knew that the berries were picked that morning.
Max also raised chickens and sold eggs. During the winter, he made "Adirondack Chairs"
in a shop in his home and sold them. Max
had been a tenant at his home and farm but eventually bought a home on Route
9, several miles away, where he built a very nice permanent vegetable
stand. * To Harry, a dozen ears of corn consisted of 13 ears to compensate for a possibly wormy ear; thus, a burlap bag contained 52 ears of corn.
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