Todd Greiner Farms to ship zucchini and sweet corn in August
Todd Greiner Farms to ship zucchini and sweet corn in August
HART, MI — Michigan zucchini and sweet corn are featured items being grown, packed and shipped by Todd Greiner Farms this August.
With a Sept. 5 Labor Day holiday circled on the 2015 calendar, Greiner anticipates a three-week sweet corn shipping season, according to Aaron Fletcher, sales and logistics coordinator for the firm, which is located in Hart, MI. Sweet corn in this central-west side of Michigan’s “mitten” is expected to mature for harvest on or before Aug. 15. Last year, the harvest didn’t start until Aug. 18 and Labor Day was Sept. 1, so the 2014 sweet corn season was essentially two weeks long.
Aaron Fletcher, sales and logistics coordinator.
Greiner’s zucchini shipments will also be very strong in August, Fletcher said.
Greiner’s hard squash and pumpkin shipments will begin about Sept. 1 and run until Halloween. “They’re not worth much on Nov. 1,” he joked.
Greiner, which grows about 150 acres of apples, will start shipping Honeycrisp apples in mid-September. Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, Fuji and Galas are other fresh-market varieties produced by Greiner.
This year the firm built a controlled atmosphere storage facility, so the expectation is to ship apples until the early spring. The facility will be empty before May, so it can be used for cold storage for Greiner’s asparagus deal, which runs through May and June.
Greiner grows about 350 acres of asparagus and this spring shipped for a dozen other asparagus growers who produced a cumulative total of 1,000 acres. “That is a lot, but we wished we had more this spring,” Fletcher said. “Asparagus demand gets better every year.”
Fletcher, who joined Greiner in March 2014, said, “All of the crops look good. Michigan had a lot of moisture this year. Here we have light, sandy soils, so it drains well in rainy years. We had no flooding this year but we have a lot of irrigation, so it’s the best of both worlds.”
Greiner’s farms and other growers close to Lake Michigan have a lower chance of frost than farms further inland due to the fact that the lake water retains significant heat.
