pickles

Is there any cucumber/pickle farmers visit here? How about who makes the pickle baskets, the wood bushel size ones? Using the little tractors of course.

I never gave pickles much thought before lately but somewhere there has to be a lot of cucumbers grown.

Many many years ago my dad raised cucumbers to sell the the pickle companies. Learned to hate picking them things because we had to do it every day. But now days I do raise some to make pickles and relish

When I was a kid,Montcalm County Michigan was the largest pickle producing county in the US. Every little town had a pickle plant at that time. Aunt Jane's was here in Sheridan,just down the road from the old Carnation milk plant that was just torn down. Part of that old pickle plant is a tool and die business now. Some of it was torn down a long time ago. I just tore down one of our cattle barns a year ago last fall that was built from some of the corrugated steel from it.
Back then,they were all hand picked by migrant laborers. That had some effect on local culture. It seems like every year,at least one more family that came here to pick cucumbers,would stay. There were some interracial marriages that happened among young folks. Every fall when we started school,harvest wasn't over yet and there would always be a large number of migrant kids who started school with us. Most would leave when harvest was over.
The industry is pretty much gone from Montcalm County now,but there are still some grown here in Michigan. It's pretty much all mechanized these days.
As far as wooden crates or boxes,I think they were mostly made at local saw mills just like the pallets were when we had a large refrigerator industry here.

Lots of cucumbers grown in Gratiot County, which is just east of RRLund. As he said, it is all mechanized now pretty much. There is a small pickle plant/factory in central Gratiot Co, called Sparks Pickle Co. The pickles soak in their brine in these deep tanks that are mostly in the ground. I was told the are about 15' deep. They are probably 10-15' across, and there are LOTS of these tanks out there. I don't know what kind of pickles they make, but it sure has a funny smell when they remove them from those vats and when they truck them through Ithaca in huge plastic totes with open tops. I heard they take them somewhere where they are "finished out", maybe they are sold to the place that finishes them out, I don't know for sure. Sparks Pickle Company uses almost all IH tractors, and has a " timeline" of tractors working around there, from new to ones from the 60's. The pickle harvesting seems sort of wasteful, kind of like potatoes, many of the farmers are contracted to a certain size from what I've been told, and the machine sorts them and spits out the over and undersized ones. There is cucumbers left all over the field when they are done, just like potatoes, and there is nothing wrong with them, they are good eating.

Ross

Several years ago and last summer the field a couple of down the roads they grew cukes. The actual harvest was done by stoop labor and they would harvest two times a couple of weeks apart. I went out after the last time this year and picked up like 30 of them for salad. Every one of them was not your perfect store type of shape so they just leave them. They were sized from tinny to lopsided etc. So sad but I do like eating them. Someday I need to make real pickles in a vat. Do a boat load of canning but never tried doing crock pickles.

Freestone Pickle Co. over in Bangor MI. buys a lot of pickles, but I understand it's from contracted farmers. They have these huge vats like 15' diameter and probably as tall. Their hot (as in spicy) deli dill is pretty good. You'll see them some times sold one at a time in sealed plastic bag/tube at mom and pop corner stores. Try them if you get a chance. A lot of them are grown east of South Haven (or used to anyway). These days I see a lot of trucks bring them from God only knows where. Like previously mentioned it's amazing how many get left in the field after harvesting. I plant them like every other year with intention to cold brine some in a crock, but just never seem to get around to it. They end up over ripe but the chickens seem to like em well enough. I like pickles but absolutely hate cucumbers -weird huh? JD