Day in a Life of a Grower: Harvesting
Have you ever wondered if you have what it takes to grow food year-round using hydroponics?
Step inside a working farm and explore what it’s like to be a hydroponic grower! Fiona with Rocket Greens will document what it’s like to seed, transplant, grow, and harvest in a Growcer modular farm*. Plus, how Rocket Greens distributes their harvest through their subscription box which you can understand by following Fiona on a distribution day.
Harvesting
We begin preparing for our Wednesday harvests at the start of the week. There’s a lot more to a harvest day than simply taking plants out of our farm – each and every plant has a place to go!
Planning
An example of what a Launch Box subscriber receives every week.
Two-thirds of what we harvest goes to our LaunchBox subscribers. Our Launch Box is a weekly subscription of locally grown greens and we offer large and small subscription sizes. We always try to keep things fresh and make sure we distribute a different variety of greens to our community members every week of the year.
In the planning process, I communicate with our customers about their needs for the week. This week we’re distributing Rocket Greens to . . .
- Our kitchen
- The Churchill Health Centre
- The Tundra Pub
- Tamarack Foods
- The Northern store
Figuring out everyone’s needs helps me to plan where each plant is going in advance of our harvest. Once we’ve determined our needs for the week, I sit down to make a harvest plan. I usually do this sitting in the Growcer, so I can look at our beautiful plants in the process. Just like with seeding, I use pen and paper!
My harvest planning happens on this step stool. Usually there’s a cup of coffee within arms’ reach!
I make the harvest plan while in the Growcer so I can look at our beautiful plants in the process.
By Tuesday afternoon we’ve made sure our reusable bags are clean, our seedlings are healthy, our herbs are packaged up, and we are fully prepared to set foot in the Growcer on Wednesday morning.
After a good night’s sleep and breakfast, we suit up and get to it!
Harvest day wear generally includes gloves, lab coats and hats. (Jenna - left, Fiona - right)
This is what we bring into the farm with us:
- Clipboard (with our harvest plan, Launch Box plan, weigh sheet and transplant sheet)
- Two clean filters
- Bowls (for weighing veggies)
- Blue bags (one for each subscriber)
- Large cooler bags (for packaging produce)
Harvest time
Harvesting itself takes about 90 minutes with two of us who are comfortable with the process and who have worked in the farm together a lot before. This doesn’t sound like a long time, but we have lots of work to do on Wednesdays.
Our Growcer container is narrower than newer models; we only have two feet of space to work in. This space is used by two of us who are harvesting, weighing, reaching, climbing on ladders, and packaging our veggies. We are moving around constantly! Jenna and I have done at least a dozen harvests together, which means we know each other’s jobs well, and can work around one another easily.
One of us is in charge of putting together the Launch Boxes – usually Jenna does this – while I package greens for grocery stores, restaurants, and our kitchen.
A batch of Launch Boxes.
