I was trimming red cabbage today at work. It brought back a billion memories of a process that I was part of for five summers in the eighties and early nineties, a process I never really had a need to document but is now coming out as if I were going to work in the cabbage fields tomorrow morning. The thing that really started the memories coming back was the cabbage star, little pieces of stalk and leaves that are often left over after trimming.
When I was 12 years old, I went to work planting “skips” behind an eight seater cabbage planter. The job was temporary, until I could learn how to actually sit on the planter and move with the speed it required.
My job was to take a handful of cabbage transplants, walk behind the planter and put a plant in any gap in the four rows that the planter placed on its trip down the field. The work was long and tiring, walking what could amount to dozens of miles during any given day. These weren’t small fields; five acres deep might be a good estimate for some, ten acres on others. When planting dozens of rows per day, the up and back walk was quite considerable. Most days the farm didn’t even use a skip planter, mainly because a person, especially a 12 year old, could get pretty worn out after ten or so hours of walking and bending over every few yards.
I didn’t last long on the skips. Less than a week after starting my job with the farm I was riding the planter, one of eight people slapping transplants into the arms of a spinning wheel. It was hard to get the hang of the momentum, and my arms didn’t quite reach into the transplant box to get refills. For much of the first few days I had to be helped by the person sitting next to me. They would slap in two for every one plant that I was able to get in. Eventually I got the hang of it, and by the end of the planting season I could run one of the wheels by myself.
Getting the plants in the ground is a huge step, and the process consumes all of the front end labor hours. Maintenance required only a regular eight hour day, practically a vacation after the sixteen hour days of planting. The maintenance of the large cabbage fields was often by hoe and by hand. When we got to the farm each morning we were allowed to sharpen our hoes on the grinder, shooting sparks onto the concrete barn floor as the humidity of the day started to put sweat on our eyebrows. Sweat didn’t matter. This job, like moving irrigation pipe or sweeping barn floors or stacking pallets, was busy work, work in anticipation of the harvest to come, the other bookend of long days in the fields.
Harvest was done by hand. Each of us had an 8 inch knife, long enough to reach under the largest leaves and snap the stalk. There wasn’t much cutting involved unless a person was lucky enough to have a really sharp knife. Knives went dull quick, so it was more a matter of learning how to apply correct pressure so that the weight of the cabbage head would snap the stalk where the knife blade was placed.
A constant rhythm was required and encouraged by a tractor mounted radio playing the rock hits of the era on 96.5 WCMF. I can’t hear a Skid Row song without thinking of picking cabbage. Eighteen and Life seemed to be the anthem of my third summer on the farm.
During the harvest, the field manager only wanted to see “asses and elbows”, a reference to the only things really visible to someone observing a row of pickers. As the cabbage was picked, we would load it into 4×4x4 wooden boxes, six of those on a trailer, twenty or so trailers a day. From the fields it went into storage to await incoming orders and then trimming and bagging.
The new kid never gets to do any of the good jobs such as stand on the trim line or drive the tractor or run the forklift. My first summer in the trimming barn I was on clean up duty, making sure that the conveyor line built into the floor kept moving the trimmed leaves up into a waiting dump truck. My second summer I bagged the trimmed cabbage as it came down another conveyor belt. Fifty pound bags, stacked five to a row and four high. The cabbage came about as fast as the blisters and blood as the mesh of the bags dug into the skin of my knuckles and the areas between my fingers. There was no time to heal or nurse or worry about any of that. There was also no time to contemplate how a 13 year old who weighed less than 100 pounds was supposed to throw fifty pound bags neatly on a pallet, one bag every two minutes. I have no idea how I did it, but I lasted the summer and came back looking for more.
By the next summer I was able to work the trim line. I would take a head of cabbage out of a 4×4x4 box placed on a hydraulic lift. As the box emptied I could use a lever to tip the box closer to me until I had removed all of the hundreds of cabbage from the box. A quick slice at the stem end to remove most of the outer leaves and the trimming was basically complete. Trimmed cabbage went on the belt down to the baggers and the cabbage leaves went to the conveyor belt in the floor by my feet. A protective bib helped deflect the blade of the trimming knife from cutting the person doing the trimming, but I still have scars on my chest and stomach from some misplaced chops.
During lunch and dinner breaks while the trimming was going on, each of the worker kids would gather up handfuls of the cabbage stars and proceed to play in the vast warehouses and weed fields surrounding the warehouses. We’d climb in and out of empty bins, underneath corn harvesters, inside parts trucks or underneath office desks. The whole game was to hit each other with the flying stars (which could fly quite far if thrown correctly) and keep track of how many times each person was hit. No teams, no alliances, just twenty minutes of brutal non stop running and throwing. Once lunch was over, the remaining cabbage stars were dropped pretty much where you stood, left for a game the next day or week when someone would come across the pile and use it as needed. Bloody noses and skinned knees were common sights on the trim floor after a brutal round of cabbage stars. Walking back to our stations, we could see the damage we did to each other. Often, simple smiles and shrugs would carry a “no harm done” attitude into the next round.
Thinking on it, it’s hard to believe we were all just kids and in charge of all that food. That is a lot of responsibility. We had no idea where that cabbage was going, and to be honest we didn’t care. Cabbage was something to trim and put in bags and throw on a pallet. To think too hard about how people ate the stuff would get in the way, get in the way of doing a job and trying to have some fun in the process.
