The Harvest Rush at Puyallup
Warm weather forces a premature start to the raspberry season, leaving growers in urgent need of labor.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
There is a great demand for berry pickers this week throughout the Puyallup valley. The warm sunshine has hustled the berries along and the raspberry crop is here at least a week ahead of time and pickers are scarce. The Fruit association figured on beginning to pick on July 4, and pickers were to report on that date, but the ripening process has gone on much more rapidly than was calculated and picking commenced today. After the raspberry crop will come the blackberry, both of which promise to be unusually large.
“The warm sunshine has hustled the berries along and the raspberry crop is here at least a week ahead of time.”
The Puyallup Valley remains an agricultural powerhouse, but the labor dynamics of the seasonal harvest—now as then—remain a delicate balance of weather, market demand, and the challenge of finding seasonal workers.
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