One of the money-making activities for me as a teenager was picking cucumbers from a field on my parent’s property. I must admit that I did little in the overall scheme of things. My dad did the tilling of soil. I helped plant the seeds, did some of the watering, did most of the picking. But the idea of planting cucumbers and driving the produce to the sorting facility would not have happened if not for the involvement of my parents.
When the cucumbers started to grow, you had to check the patch every day. Small cucumbers were more valuable by the pound than larger ones. The small ones would be be pickled by Gedney and made into ‘Sweet Gherkins‘. The larger ones would be used for sliced dill pickles.
I would harvest the cucumbers using bushel baskets or cardboard boxes. You have to bend down and brush back the leaves to see what was worth picking. Even if you used gloves, your forearms would itch after picking. If there was a large harvest, cucumbers would be put into gurney sacks before transporting to the sorting facility.
There was a place a few miles from our house in Milltown, Wisconsin that had a machine that would sort cucumbers by size. The harvest was dumped onto a conveyor belt at one end. The machine would shake the harvest by size into baskets, which were then weighted. At the furthest end was a bin for very largest cucumbers that were of no value to Gedney. We could either take them home or they would be thrown out.
I remember one visit where the guy running the sorting machine (an old man named ‘Johnson’ who had some fingers missing on his hands) wrote a check for less than one dollar. Old man Johnson was a nice man.
I think the reason I picked cucumbers was probably because when my mom was growing up on the property where I grew up, she helped her parents harvest cucumbers, too.