The instruments had been kept in ice water so they would stay crisp. “Feel it, it’s wet,” said Daniel Battaglia, 37, holding out his butternut squash French horn. But the temperature hovered around 90 and the day was windless, and as they played the Bach chorale, they were racing against time. In this weather, the instruments would soon grow soft and the mouthpieces gummy, or they might dry out.

Mr. Stuckenbruck’s daughter, Erin, the fourth player, was trained on traditional instruments. In comparison, she said, playing vegetables was “very unpredictable.”

“You have to think while you’re playing,” said Ms. Stuckenbruck, 23. “You troubleshoot with a knife. You’re shaving holes down, making holes bigger, shoving stuff in to make the pitch different.”

Her father’s patience was perhaps the key to the continued existence of the Vegetable Orchestra.

“Let’s do it again,” he said, as they sat in the broiling sun. “We can do it better.”

A smear of orange vegetable matter had stuck to his sheet music.

Mr. Stuckenbruck was born in Stuttgart, Germany, the son of a saw player. He attended a Waldorf school — which favors hands-on learning — and moved to New York in his 20s to play violin and saw; he played the saw with the New York Philharmonic this spring.

He and his wife, a pianist, moved to Long Island in the 1980s, and he created the first Vegetable Orchestra at the Waldorf School of Garden City around 2005.