harvested peas yesterday, used an antique veining machine

[bryce d]

I have some friends at a historical farm nearby. Yesterday they invited me to help them harvest peas. I had been told about an antique vining machine that they have had in the family for years.

I have always heard about it after they run it for the year. Well this year they took pity on me and called before they ran the machine.

Wow was that ever cool. We pulled up the peas, plant and all. We filled a pickup truck. We took it to the vining machine.

This machine was built in 1922. This machine is the size of a large box van truck. It has a large drum in the middle of it. The drum has paddles in it to break the pods apart and a screen exterior so the peas will fall through and the rest of the plant will still stay inside the drum. The paddles are angled to slowly push the plants to the other side. The peas fall on to a wide angled conveyor. They roll down the angle as the conveyor goes up and drags any leaves and debris up and out the other side. The peas fall into bins. The rest of the plant goes out the drum and falls into a pile that will be used to make silage for cattle feed. It took all of about 30 minutes for this machine to devour a truckload of pea plants.

Then we went and got another truck load and did it all again. After we finished they divided all the peas up for everyone that helped. They told me that I had about an hour to get them processed and into bottles or freezer. Or else they would start to spoil.

That was an interesting afternoon. "try to visualize whirled peas" OK, so my son didn't just get that.

[applestar]

That sounds really really neat! I'm imagining that it must be somewhat ,similar mechanism to the cranberry harvester we saw one fall, with the shelling part added of course. We saw the harvesting at a historic cranberry farm.

I think it's amazing that somebody came up with "machines" like these.

So what did you do with your share of peas?