MeInMaine Blog

Tag: maine blueberry raking

  • Squeak Squeak Sound Of The Maine Potato Farm Harvester, Digger….

    Getting Maine Potatoes Out Of The Farm Land In To Spud House Storage.
    Snacks, Lunch Tastes 100 Times Tastier In The Maine Harvest Potato Field.

    Picking potatoes, working as a kid on the Maine farm land means starting early, getting up when it is pitch black outside.

    Rise and shinning to the smell of frying, sizzling bacon and home fries, eggs just the way you like them. Partnered with a stack of pancakes, french toast drizzled in Houlton Farms Dairy real butter and maple, blueberry or strawberry syrup. Preparing the sleepy workers, the potato warriors for the another day in the Maine field or spud house.

    Sometimes the radio or potato farmer hot line pre-recorded message announces a delay in the harvest start time.

    To be at the field at 8AM because of frost, or a rain set back. Possibly a scrub of the potato harvest mission altogether. Regardless, like a paratrooper gathered around the open airplane door to jump when the word comes in, the Maine farm workers need to have an equally gut busting lunch packed to get them through the day. The cold mornings, the blistering hot afternoons and any other kind of weather in between coupled with hard outdoor laboring hour after hour burn a lot of calories.

    Long hours when the weather is good means make sure extra water, snacks, a sandwich or two is handcrafted for that field lunch. Ice added to the water jug that is crucial for staying hydrated. To wash down the potato dust, to wet the whistle during the manual labor.

    Hard work but lessons learned in the Maine potato field classroom that stay with the worker for life. Making the most of the rain, cold, lack of sleep if you stayed up too late and played the night before. Clearing your head with the blast of fall air in Maine sweeping across the open potato field. Zipping up the sweatshirt a little tighter. Wishing you had added another clothing layer this morning as you fumbled in the dark to get ready to head to the section of Maine farm that needs harvesting attention focus today.

    Grapevine rumor has it among the migrant field workers that travel the circuit to harvest crops of all kind that Maine blueberry raking is harder than potato picking or harvester work.

    Because of the hotter weather weeks earlier in the year Downeast in Maine where most of the succulent blue good for you fruit is plucked, boxed, shipped to the processor freezers.

    Both field work arenas can be better all the way around if the Maine weather cooperates. If breakdowns are minimal and if the workers around you are pleasant, hardworking. Not Eeyores, whiners and lazy. Like any workplace setting, the chore at hand is less taxing if you know how to work, enjoy labor and rub shoulders with others wired the same way on the job chain gang.

    Strong, dependable work ethic in Maine is not a secret. To be considered lazy by your peers would be the worse shame a person could carry. Discrimination has happened a lot over the years because of what field work picking produces in kids started early. Begun when all family members are knee high to a grasshopper tall and brought along with older brothers, sisters, parents to the fields for the Maine harvest. Joy in being industrious, learning how to do the work more efficiently on the Maine fields meant crew foreman in the cities ask one question to the crowd of job applicants.

    “Who grew up on a Maine farm, worked on one in the audience?”

    Hands that went up meant a response from the guy with the clipboard, wearing a hard hat as he motions, saying “Come with me. You have a job. You start now”.

    Maine Potato Picking By Hand Is Hard Work Video

    Working Inside Grading Potato House Spuds Video

    Maine, we appreciate everything a little extra. Work a little harder, respect our surroundings and the fewer people in them a whole lot more.

    I’m Maine REALTOR Andrew Mooers, ME Broker
    207.532.6573
    info@mooersrealty.com
    Like Us On Facebook.
    Follow Us On Youtube

  • Learning From Your Kids Travels In And Out Of Maine.

    Maine Blueberry Raking Under The Hot Sun.
    $2.50 Per Box, 25 Pounds Or Half Bushel Paid For Raking Maine Blueberries.

    As children grow up, graduate from high school, college in Maine, they venture out, explore, begin their adult life.

    And what they learn, they share with parents back at the ranch. Or when a trip is taken to where they are a long way from the childhood Maine home.

    Oldest son Alex is swinging back through Maine from Colorado rafting, working winters at A Basin ski area to do his annual blueberry and potato pilgrimage.

    And Maine blueberry living on the barrens is not something I experienced growing up on a potato farm.

    So interesting to hear about the Maine blueberry gathering process that starts at 5AM with no delay due to frost like fall potato harvesting. Wyman’s is the central blueberry in Maine giant that runs the processing / distribution centers. The summer blueberry harvest like Maine potato fall operations is about three weeks long.

    Tines, rakes to comb through the Maine blueberry bushes gather the precious fruit. Strings for lanes are laid out in a field to follow for the blueberry picking. It helps if you get between two seasoned Honduran blueberry rakers / pickers as it serves to help like NASCAR drafting. You get pushed, pulled along by their momentum. Alex had a blueberry rake with 70 tines. To glean a great deal of blueberries with each swipe, swath taken with the rake. As you follow a course across the barrens marked out with a simple white string for lanes.

    A Mexican family shows up, puts on the apron, serves the blue berry workers meals out of a cook shack with many gas burners.

    Five dollars for lunch, six dollars for dinner which is unlimited. Breakfast is on your own with egg sandwiches made at 4 am to prepare for a Maine summer day that will only get hotter as it runs it course. As you wield a blueberry rake, the bigger the better for box count production.

    Strategy for more productive Maine blueberry raking, picking for the boxes that head to the processors to be frozen and distributed around the world? Find a section, row, lane that is not overgrown with bushes, rock out croppings to work around. The lower to the ground, cleaner sections have more blueberries per square foot. Less culch, other vegetation to wrestle with.

    Like potato sections in Maine that are grass free, not clumped up like end rows that grow longer or contract, these type of conditions for blueberries are more efficient to glean, rake. Not so much a hide and seek, hunt and peck process to maximize the fruit collected which translates into more boxes. Twenty five pounds is a half bushel of blueberries which the raker earns $2.50 for raking.

    In Alex’s two years of blueberry raking, staying at migrant shanty cabins for his exodus back to Maine before potato harvest and the sling shot back to being a Colorado ski lift operator winters, white albino berries have been seen once. Rare and used for jam for the locals.

    Thought to have some special powers, he said he spied only one ten foot section of the stand out white Maine blueberries.

    I asked if sampling the Maine blueberry happens on the barrens remembering nibbling on fresh strawberries during picking as a kid myself on the farm. He said with pesticides folks are warned not to, that it could cause rumblings down below.

    Maine, big state, the people here spend more of life outdoors.

    I’m Maine REALTOR Andrew Mooers, ME Broker