Meet the Dahlia Harvest Cart 1.0
Meet the Dahlia Harvest Cart 1.0
Let me introduce you to the Dahlia Harvest Cart 1.0
It’s a bit of a rough design, but it gets the job done!
Harvesting Dahlias is extremely time consuming and somewhat cumbersome because we sanitize our snips in a 10% bleach water solution between every single plant… which means we have to haul the solution with us up and down the aisles while harvesting.
(This protocol is recommended by the American Dahlia Society to help prevent the spread of virus and other disease from plant to plant. Virus is easily spread via snips, which is why we don’t allow anyone else to harvest our Dahlias. We work hard to keep our Dahlia fields as disease free as possible!)
We used to carry a bucket down the aisles with us, dipping our snips into bleach water between each cut.
However, 3-4 hours of constantly bending over to dip the snips in the bucket was hard on our bodies!
So we started imagining a better system that would allow us to sanitize the snips without bending over.
The Harvest Cart has a caddy that holds our bleach and rinse water jars. The bottom of the cart has a large bucket for holding the cut flowers.
It’s so much easier on our bodies and now we’re not bending over a million times a day!
Here’s our workflow for harvesting Dahlias:
Fill clean buckets with cold water and drive them out to the Dahlia field in the golf cart.
Scrub and sharpen snips.
Fill the jars with bleach solution and wheel the Harvest Cart out to the Dahlia field.
Push the Harvest Cart up and down the Dahlia aisles, cutting stems with freshly sanitized snips between each plant.
Drop cut stems into Harvest Cart bucket (bucket is dry but stems are only out of water for about 2 minutes).
When finished with the row of Dahlias, push the Harvest Cart back to the golf cart.
Place cut stems on a table or golf cart seat and begin processing - cutting off foliage and unnecessary side shoots into wheel barrows.
Before placing in water, recut the stems so they can take up water.
Once buckets are full, place them in a cool dark place to rehydrate.
We’ll likely make some modifications in the future, but for now… it works!
QUESTIONS?
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