THE BARN

On Saturday we started working in the barn, testing the lines to make sure they're ready for work on Monday, when the pack barn starts up for the spring.

The barn works something like this: asparagus comes to the barn from the fields in 'lugs', aka plastic tubs, and is cooled with super cold jets, and then is tagged so it can be tracked in the barn. The lugs then travel through several coolers, then are brought into the pack barn, where one person lays the asparagus on a conveyor belt, spears down. A knife then slices the end of the asparagus off, and brings it to another belt, where someone places each spear into a slot. A machines takes a picture of each spear in order to determine diameter. Then, the spears are sorted based on diameter and bunched into equally-sized bunches (Whitney and Chelsea are bunchers). The bunches travel down a conveyor belt to me (whooo), where I weigh the bunches to make sure they're within the proper limit. I work the Costco line, so all the asparagus I weigh goes to Costco (Kaitlin, Amy and I are weighers). After that, the asparagus is loaded by Phil and placed onto pallets, and David drives the pallet lifter thing into another cooler. And then another one, and then to shipping. The barn is loud and wet (because the asparagus is constantly being sprayed with freezing cold water) and it's great. Tomorrow is our first full day, and I'm PUMPED. Although tomorrow night, I might be less excited about it.

Saturday afternoon we traveled to the big city of Port Rowan (how new and exciting eh). It was super fun to show the team my little town.

I was 86% sure David, Phil, and Whitney were going to fall into the lake, but somehow they managed to stay dry.