Pumpkin seed harvest

Here are some pumpkin seeds we bought at the market last week to eat. Garry has been interested in the pumpkins grown by many of the small farmers in the village since we moved here two years ago. He found out that they were growing them for the seed. This year he has gotten to know some of the farmers growing them and how they process the seeds after harvesting.






The fields get rather weedy, but the pumpkins grew pretty well this year. In the fall the farmer goes out with a tractor and a v shaped "plow" to rake them into rows. A few days later they go out to the field in the morning with a machine that breaks up the pumpkins and separates the seeds.











Guys walk along and throw the pumpkins into the machine behind the tractor, and the seeds come out into a bag attached to to the back of the machine. The full bags get stacked in a wagon. The farmers thought the crop looked good this year, but the pumpkins are only yielding 200 pounds of seed per acre this year, only half of what they had last year. Pumpkins are worth about a dollar each for the seed in them.




The broken pieces of pumpkin are left in yellow rows in the field. You sometimes see people out picking up the pieces of pumpkin rind to feed their cows and pigs. I assume that the they are gleaning, you see people out picking up stuff left on the ground after sunflowers and corn are harvested in the fields.


The full bags are taken back to the village where the farmers have made different things to clean and dry them. First they put the seeds in a big tank of water and wash them. The pieces of pumpkin goo sinks and the seeds float, so they scoop the seeds off the top with a sieve and put them back into bags, and bring them to the dryer. The dryer is like a big furnace, that blows air through the bin of seeds.













This is a injector pump from an old tractor which they rigged up to squirt fuel into the furnace. The vacuum cleaner is being used to help suck the exhaust air out. Our visitors last week commented that they could smell pumpkin cooking while walking in the village, it was the smell of the seeds drying.






While the seeds are being dried, they rake the ones on the top so they can dry evenly. You can see Maxim doing this in the photo when he and Garry went to take photos of the process. Maxim did some welding for these guys on their drying furnace.




The seeds are dried for 14 to 16 hours and put back into bags to sell. There are two different types of pumpkins grown, smaller yellow ones that yield more seed, and larger blue/green ones that have less seed, but the seeds are worth more. The large seeds are worth 3 dollars a kilo when they are sold.