Here is an interesting piece of our fruit farming history.  When I was a girl, when fruit packing didn’t involve cold storage warehouses, we packed into wooden boxes and used paper cups (like cupcake papers) to put the fruit in.  The cups were red, purple, or green and the color was selected to compliment the fruit being packed–plums, peaches or nectarines.

Packers kept a tally of the boxes they packed.  We made hash marks on a piece of a shim (the cardboard layer put between the layers of fruit).  We were paid by the box.  As we packed the boxes, we had to size the fruit (we had metal rings to help us) and then count the rows and how many pieces of fruit went into each row.  I remember being paid 33 cents/box.

In later years, Penta-Pak pre-sized forms were invented and we just had to fill the trays with the fruit, keeping everything pointing the right directions with the stems down.

Here are some old photos of Kelsey plums coming in from the orchard.  Grandpa Rudolf is keeping an eye on them.

We packed the fruit in his shed.  Grandma is there, packing the Kelseys.  In front of her is the canister that held the paper cups.  The lug boxes to the left are the culls (fruit not fit for sale).  They will be dumped in the field at the end of the day.  The filled wooden boxes were stacked with slats between some of the rows to hold the stacks together.  (there were no pallets or forklifts yet).  Each stack was a different size.  The boxes were stamped with the size and variety.

Below is an old Santa Rosa plum stamp I’d saved for the memory of it.

In time, the packing shed was moved to our place.  This is the sorting machine Dad built for sizing plums.  I’m in the bandana packing the large sized plums.  Eric is putting the pads and lids on before stapling them.  Dad figured out a way to blow a fan into that air tube with vents to keep us cool on those hot hot summer days.

The other end of the packing shed (not being used on that day) had the individual packing stands for hand packing peaches and nectarines.  On top of the stands are stacks of the Penta-Pak trays for each size.  Bins below the stands held the culls.  They could be wheeled out when full and a forklift would dump them into the manure spreader to be spread in the avenues at the end of the day.

I spent all of my summers in this packing shed, working hard from sun up to sun down.  We were strong.  We were fast.  We sent thousands and thousands of boxes out of this shed to people all across the country.