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| Menands Farmers Market |
My uncle Harry was a
tomato, corn, bean, and cucumber farmer.
He could do the planting by himself and picked most of the sweet corn
also, snapping the ears off the stalks and putting 52* ears into a burlap
bag. Some of the tomatoes, corn, and
cucumbers were sold by 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)
which was 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 in picking beans and cucumbers since they
were rather small and were sold in bushel baskets. His solution:
child labor. Certainly, in the
late 1940s and early l950s, there were no migrant laborers to pick these crops in
our area, but there were school children 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 that
they were filled a little over the top, and then carry the bushel to the end of
the row where he would affix the cover.
Some of the workers would try to cheat, sometimes 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,
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 not as difficult as picking beans, but
the pickers had to be careful to pick tomatoes that were properly ripe, and not
green or overripe. Once in awhile 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 too hard to pick, but the varieties that
were grown then did not have the smooth skin that 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 the place 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, which was then
between Jack’s Place and Harry’s home.
Unlike other crops, which were annuals, strawberries usually need a
second year to yield well and didn’t have to be planted every year. Also, unlike most of the other summer crops,
strawberries were planted as young plants purchased from a commercial grower. Max had a tow behind the 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 speed of the tractor. 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, I
believe 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. I think 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, and 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 bad ear; thus a burlap bag contained four dozen ears of corn.
