Making Use of these Cold Mornings

We are bulk harvesting something every day, weather permitting.  We find that cabbages are more resilient, and carrots and beets are most directly affected by their temperature at harvest time.  Since those roots store more densely than cabbage, warm air cannot escape the storage bin as quickly.  They're best stored unwashed, so if that dark-coloured heats up in the afternoon, it will also increase the cooling time.  A full bin of beets (about 600 lbs) can take several days to cool down to its core, so its best to be finished harvesting before it's warm out. 

Increasingly, a snag we encounter is having the space in our coolers to store our harvest.  It is the fourth year we have had our shipping container cooler, and while it fits a lot of vegetables, it inevitably needs re-organization as more harvest is added.   A full re-arrangement can take the tractor hours, all the while, the cooler door has to remain open.  Anyone who knows (or anyone who is) a person who feels strongly about closing the refrigerator door as quickly can feel how painful that is.  To prevent the cooler contents from warming up, the best solution is to work quickly and move things around on really cold mornings.

While cold mornings are still short, in short supply, and everything suddenly needs to be harvested, tasks are often fighting for their places at the top of our immediate must-dos list.  With the current weather patterns, we can only pick one task every morning- and hope we picked the right one.  The conflict between harvest timing and cooler reorganization may not be riveting subject matter, but it is certainly a reality of what farming at our scale is like.