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How do you clean and present your produce?
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Posted by canuckistani 5b (My Page) on Sat, Aug 15, 09 at 14:38
| Just wondering how growers here clean and present their stuff.
What items do you wash if any? What is your washing protocol- do you add an antibacterial to the water, how do you dry your produce?
How do you clean root crops?
How do you clean your leafy greens and lettuce.
Also would really be interested in hearing innovative ways of packaging and presenting- really trying to avoid plastic.
Thanks again folks! |
Follow-Up Postings:
RE: How do you clean and present your produce?
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| Hi there I spray off the root crops and we bunch them with elastics (with leaves on) rather than putting in bags. We do this for carrots, beets, radish, kohlrabi. The only thing I pre-bag is potatoes. We sell some carrots and beets in bulk and let the consumer bag them at the market (we take an electric scale and sell by the pound). We don't wash the lettuce or tomatoes. We use a cloth to wipe soil off of large cucumbers, and a spray system to wash potatoes (basically a table with a grill the potatoes are placed on and a water hose). A lot of vendors pre-bag radish and carrots etc but the customer has no way of knowing when the produce was picked. If you keep the leaves on they can see the veg is fresh. We put about 12 carrots in a bunch and charge $4.95 ea bunch. Beets are 8-10 per bunch and charge $4.25ea. if I can figure out how to put a photo on here I will |
RE: How do you clean and present your produce?
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| My produce is just rinsed with regular well water. NO antibaterial. Tomorrow, our local university is coming out to test our produce to see how safe our produce is coming directly out of the garden. Some kind of study to see if produce really needs to be washed before eating. We don't use anything but commercial fertilizer and roundup-type herbicide long before planting. As far as displaying our produce, we use alot of 25# tomato boxes for almost everything, except early crops. We don't rubberband anything, but sell by eaches. We have customers that might only want 1-2 green onions or radishes, and by selling individual items they buy what they want/need. |
RE: How do you clean and present your produce?
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| Thanks for the info! Do you guys think keeping the roots on the produce and having them soak in water while they're waiting to be sold is a good idea? A lot of the leafy stuff wilts pretty quickly in the heat. |
RE: How do you clean and present your produce?
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| I usually leave the roots on, and alittle water is ok. But soaking radishes CAN cause them to split. You are better off to take a spray bottle of ice water and spray all of them down every so often. Keep most of the leafy stuff in a cooler with a frozen bottle. Wrap the bottle with newspaper or paper towel to prevent freezer burn. As the produce that is on the table starts to wilt alittle, trade it out with some of the produce from the cooler. Put the tabled produce in the cooler for a quick refreshing cool down. |
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