Labor Day Prunes

Labor Day Prunes. . Prunes are not picked like other fruit, but shaken out of trees, then picked up off the ground. In the early days, after the prunes were picked up and hauled to a shed, they were dipped in boiling water and lye to crack the skin. This procedure would keep the fruit from swelling. The prunes would be spread onto trays to dry in the sun for a week., In the Fall of 1918, an unexpected three-day rainfall caught the county's entire prune crop lying out on trays. The odor of fermenting prunes hung in the air long after the ruined crop was collected and destroyed., EVENTUALLY PRUNES WERE DRIED in dehydrators, then the fruit was graded according to size and quality., Sunsweet, a cooperative of prune and apricot growers, developed the "tenderized” prune by boiling it to make it soft and more palatable for the consumer. In the 1960s, Sunsweet introduced the pitted prune after one of its employees invented a mechanized prune pitter., SHORTLY AFTER WORLD WAR II, Paul Mariani, Jr. introduced the first commercially-sold soft prunes unfallen prunes in transparent packages. At first his competitors scoffed at the new- fangled packaging. Within five years, however, the transparent packages or “moist-pack” became the dried-fruit industry packaging standard., Picking prunes was too hard on the knees! Besides it was a frustrating job. You spend all week on your knees picking each prune (and there were thousands of them!) and when you picked the last tree, you had to start all over again because the unfallen prunes had now fallen! Very discouraging!! , Charles Miguelgorry, son of Basque immigrant farmers, 1996