David Birdwell

Hi! I'm visiting Tajikistan in July and have been looking for any permaculture or agroforestry projects in the country. I heard in a lecture I watched from the last PDC Bill and Geoff gave together, one lady mention something about her work in Tajikistan and it totally surprised me. I was born in California but lived in Tajikistan till I was 10 and it's not a place that comes up very often at all. I'm interested in connecting with anyone in the country doing any kind of regeneration or natural design work.

One issue I see with bunching based on the hand size of the harvester is that it might not correlate with an optimal size for the client. As well as a somewhat significant different in hand size among staff.

I'm running a market garden in Mexico. Clients are local restaurants and then individuals who can order from our weekly availability list. Everything we sell has a unit size in order to make it easier for clients. We chose the unit sizes based on reasonable amounts for families. Most are 250g (kale, chard, broccolini) some are 500g like carrots and beets. Herbs we sell in small bundles of 50g and some things like Baby Greens Mixes we sell in bags of 150g. We bunch almost everything as it helps us organize when we pack boxes for delivery: celery, carrots, kale, broccolini, onions, scallions, various herbs, full-sized arugula etc.

I mean standard as in the same size as the other bunches that we make. Now, we harvest the total weight and then weigh each bunch out to have a pretty exact bunch size. So by standard i mean each bunch of kale is 250g. If bunching in the field, I assume before weighing, how can you ensure a reasonably similar amount of product in each bunch?

I hear about people harvesting and bunching veggies in the field but I'm not sure how to do it in a way where the bunches are mostly still standard. How do people do it?

I am looking to design a functional seed germination space for a market garden and am looking for any advice or resources anyone has to offer. Thanks!