Removing Plants in Chilliwack

  In Chilliwack greenhouse, plant removal process is much more organized than 248.  This way, it saves much of the labor cost.  The key to easier and cheaper removal of the plants is one step at a time.

  If we have an advanced facility like Merom, we could apply the same cleaning procedure for bell peppers to tomatoes.  But we don't in Chilliwack, so we do the cleaning one step at a time.  We start by first clipping the stems at the root.  We let the plants hang and dry for a day.  Then we cut the strings to drop the plants, but instead of collecting the strings like we did in 248, we let the strings hang on to the steel wire.  This saves labor for the workers to walk around and collect the strings on the floor, which are often overlooked and thrown away with plants.  After the plants are on the floor, we pile them strictly in between the pipes.  We cut off any part of plants that connects to any other place.  So in the end, we will have one long pile in between the pipes.  Finally, we will cut the long pile at some adequate distance (3 or 4 steel column is about right), and use 3 people to hold the front, middle, and back, and carry the pile outside to the garbage bin.  It is similar to how people carry the Chinese dragon in festivals.

UPDATE 1:   It seems that the plants did not get tangled and stacked enough to be done.  Plants would be sag while being carried, so each of us just carried 3-5 plants out at once instead of 2-3 person carrying 4-6. 

  Removing cucumber plants is somewhat simpler than tomatoes because of the way we grew them in Chilliwack.  If we grew the cucumbers the same way we did tomatoes (i.e. lowering the plants until they die), then the cleaning process would be the same.  But we, instead of lowering, threw the plants over the steel wire and let them grew downward.  So the cleaning process is somewhat simpler because the plants are not as tall as the tomatoes.  What we do is, as with tomatoes, cut the stem at the root first.  Then we cut the strings off, and make sure that any string knots will have to come off the steel wire to prevent disease carry-over to next generation of plants (note that we tied strings on the wire instead of hanging down rolls of strings because we didn't lower plants).  As we cut the strings, we stack the plants neatly in separated piles.  After all the plants came off the steel wire, we carry the piles out to the garbage bin.

  Cleaning procedures in Chilliwack was much easier than 248, and we learned that efficient process is very important to keep workers motivated and save costs.

Cutting Leaves Off

Cutting the leaves off for Kasja, a variety of long English is pretty much the same task as doing so for minis.  Today, we cut the leaves off to about my chest height so that we could continue to lower the plants.  We lower the plants to allocate more space for the heads to grow.  But the long English plants are already old (roughly 3 months) and are not producing as much as when they were young.  Also, stem rot disease is spreading and more than 15 plants are withered.

That being said, I doubt the effectiveness of today's operation.  According to Kyra, we want plant energy to concentrate on top and therefore trim off excess parts from the plants up to certain height.  But leaves are the producer of the energy, and to trim them off means to cut short the energy supply.  In order to verify the sanity of this action, I would have to investigate further.

Trimmed naked up to chest height.

As we trim, we also look for crooked, molded, and any defective cucumbers to get rid of.  We also get rid of other junks like suckers at the root.

Harvesting Long English

A perfect long English for harvest.

Harvesting long English is not much different from harvesting minis.  The only difference is that we allow the cucumbers to grow for longer period, so we harvest every other day instead of everyday.  We need to make sure that crooked and funny looking ones must also be cut off because they will turn out as garbage for sure.

As with minis, the flowers on long English must also be torn off because the flower will rot and so will the cucumber.  If the flower on long English is torn off when still on vine, the cucumber will no longer grow.  So that cucumber must also be cut off and thrown away.

Example of a bad cucumber that must be cut off.