Bok Choy is a specialty vegetable that is also a member of the leafy green family. It is commonly used in Asian cuisine, and still has a lot of room for growth in U.S. markets. Bok Choy is similar to fennel, in that you can either use the whole plant to prepare food or just a small portion of it. In the case of Bok Choy, the green leaves can be used for salads, and the white portion is commonly used in soups. In the pictures below, you can see that each Bok Choy is huge! This is good for the consumer because you could select them individually at the grocery store, and really get your bang for your buck.
There is a lot of work that goes into harvesting Bok Choy and all of the subsequent steps that are taken to get it to the grocery store. Below, you will see the harvesting and packing process, straight from the fields of Sabór Farms in Salinas, California!
Harvesting Bok Choy
Bok Choy is not harvested like your other leafy greens. Instead of the harvesting process either being aided by a harvesting machine or being a rapid harvesting process, Bok Choy takes a slower approach. This is because there are multiple steps taken to make sure that the Bok Choy is being packed to meet the quality standards.
Trimming Bok Choy
When harvesting Bok Choy, the harvesters come in and remove the Bok Choy from the plant and then lay them down in the field for approximately 30 minutes. This is done to soften the mid-rib (the white portion) of the plant. The harvest crew will go down an entire row to harvest and lay down all of the plants before returning to pack the harvested product.
Packing Bok Choy
Once the 30 minutes have passed, the harvest crew comes back into the field with boxes and containers (there is different packing material used based on the different customer specifications) to box up all of the harvested product. They bring the boxes to where the harvested product is, pack up the product and then leave the boxes in the field where they are packed.
At that point, another section of the harvest crew comes through the field with a trailer to load up all of the packed boxes and containers. The boxes are stacked into pallets, while the containers are individually covered and stacked.
Bok Choy Harvesting Video
You can see the overview of this entire process in the video below.
Featured Grower Information
I would like to thank Sábor Farms, Fresh Avenue and Green Light Fresh for the tour and for allowing the gathered content to be shared. Sábor Farms is a vegetable grower that is located in Salinas, California. You can also click here to get a glimpse of some of their other operations: leeks, endive, and escarole.
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Really enjoyed your videos of various produce harvesting…my goodness! Back breaking work! My concern is….im trying to eat as clean as possible…please define sanitized water…is that water containing chlorine bleach? Also, how is organic produce handled during harvesting…any difference?
Hopefully this will help to answer your questions on wash water: https://www.theproducenerd.com/2016/07/how-is-your-produce-being-washed/