Salad Spinner

Yesterday was the Downtown Des Moines Harvest Market, so we spent the end of the week harvesting and getting ready. We were able to harvest salad greens and turnips in the main garden from under the row covers. The rest of the crops were in the High Tunnel, which makes harvesting much more pleasant when it is 33° outside (and 82° inside).

Here's a shot of the beds in the HT before I started harvesting. From left to right we have Bed 1: three varieties of carrots, Bed 2: three varieties of beets, Bed 3: Pac Choi (rear) and Swiss Chard (front), Bed 4: three varieties of spinach.

Normally we wash all our greens and spin them dry in our giant salad spinner (its basically a 10 gallon perforated tub in a stainless steel housing with an electric motor - very cool!) Unfortunately the salad spinner is too much of a power hog and it wont work in the HT, so here's the low tech solution to getting the excess moisture out of the swiss chard...

It wasn't perfect by any means, but it worked well enough to dry about 20 pounds of greens. If I was 8 years old this would have been some wild fun, but needless to say, its been a long time since I've spun around that much. Can you say DIZZY!!

We finally got everything harvested (thanks Mom!), cleaned and packed up and headed for the market early Saturday morning. Here's a shot of our booth setup.

It was a good market day for us, our best indoor market sales to date. It really helps to be one of the few vendors with fresh produce. If you live in the Des Moines area and missed this great opportunity to buy fresh local produce, meats, eggs ect, plus loads of great handmade items for gifts or yourself, never fear, we do it again next month on Dec 20th. Here's the details.