Summer Heat; One of the most important reasons why washing your produce is important. Field Heat can be retained in bunched produce for hours; reducing the quality and the nutritional value of your produce.
Washing your produce is easy and in the summer can be relieving!
Select a wash tub that can accommodate your produce size; be it the kitchen sink, plastic dish pans, cattle troughs or bathtubs. Keep this vessel clean! For food safety reasons wash your vessels with soap and water and rinse with a 10% bleach solution; 9 parts water and 1 part bleach water before filling it with clean water to rinse your produce in.
Harvest your produce and dunk it in water as quickly as possible. Swish it around to remove field dirt and heat. If you able, set up two wash tubs; 1st rinse and 2nd rinse. The resulting produce is clean of dirt and debris and cool. If possible, store produce in a cooler, refrigerator or coolest place available.
Pack clean produce into clean waxed boxes if possible; no point washing your produce if you place it in dirty containers… We purchase a bolt of white muslin and cut it into 5′ segments to line our wax boxes; the wet muslin keeps produce cooler longer. After use muslin is washed in bleach solution and hung on the line to dry.
The FDA says you should rinse them under running water (and that’s all you need), and you should scrub hard-skinned veggies/fruits like cucumbers or melons, but there are a couple of products that use very mild additions to water that I think do work to get produce a bit cleaner (all of which are edible and nontoxic).
You can, of course, make your own simple wash with this simple homemade recipe that involves using a bit of vinegar, which simply contains white vinegar and water: “acetic acid in vinegar kills bacteria and helps to dissolve the wax and pesticide residues found on the skins of many fruits and vegetables.”