Collards, Chard & Kale

all right so here's just a little bit harvesting efficiencies one thing we work without guys is what will happen is well okay we need like last year we were dealing with like 450 bunches of tart at one time okay so what happens if you send out your harvester harvesters and you know for those of you who are gonna be hiring guys it's really important that they have harvest issues because if you send them out to go 200 4 and 20 they're gonna just pick one rubber band out of town from the box and then there go you know I'm not sure how many I did so they'll recount how many was in the tote and then lots of ways and then and then if there's two of them they'll get the talk and I go oh you know what you have made me lose my count so okay so here's what you do this is what we do you know Curtis you can count on what we do so we so we count them all in and bunches of twenty okay and we kind of wrap another so like if this was a bunch of 20 and we'll do this in the pack shed so let's say we will get there at 5:00 5:30 when it's dark and someone can be doing in bunches of 20 what does it just helps like the next guy and we just do something really simple like this if it was just me I would know I would put you know I had 450 in in a box and I would know that that's 420 but when you get other guys you want to have some different systems so each bundle is 20 ya know an owner and operator doesn't mess around yeah when you getting paid by the hour you know we all know that we've we've messed around here and there right then what I like to do is I'll take that whole bunch of 20 and put it on actually I'll do these two things here I put them on these two things okay so I'm going through collards I'm going through here I'm just breaking them off I I do it by size but I get a feel for it and then I'm doing this here boom done go the next one okay and so what you want to do where's that so is you want to minimize reaching your pouch or reach it in the box and but just everything needs to be right here yeah and you know you may think well that's partly that's only five seconds well times that by 450 or 800 or all your other tasks you want to really think about every step you make needs to be efficient and and smooth as possible so what's kind of go through here and I'm just gonna do several okay so here's nothing if you have employees and I just I just do this by feel so it Mayberry but some guys may want to go you know what it's eight or ten per bunch because they'll come away with twenty and it'll be it away three pounds you know because they they don't have this concept so it's like this here this is good for me I've got the tote right next to me she's going along I'm getting the lower one sometimes if they're really bad I'll just break them off they're good and I'm not really worried about trimming the ends however if I you go to the market because the business for a wholesaler on Market Street market farmers markets want that bunch chopped off yep all uniform yep so the way that would sometimes that you can do that at the market too yep that's what we used to do it so that's the case the market that way it looks fresh cuz if they sit for a couple days when they've been cut did you do that brown they don't look as fresh and your customers will say hey gun that's browning that's right that's right so if let's just say in the market if I'm doing 50 bunches for the market then I'll just you know I actually have a sheath or if I want it closed I'll just hold it in my mouth yeah yeah that's what the Mexican guys down in Central Valley California that's what they do they bunch it and then they hack it with a knife and put the knife back in their mouth can't you do this okay yeah yeah don't like I'm gonna skip this area here was it ever since during the during the summer over hey that's where it's at man that's who you want to do yeah down south Arizona Texas Southern California that's what they do overhead water because you want to cool the green and you want you wouldn't really want you know in a nutshell what it takes to do greens in the summer down here is it's kind of a two-fold strategy well maybe three is its timing your irrigation is important shade cloth and just turning up the dial on the water is really what it comes down to like I wish I had a really fancy sounding like Geoff Lawton like you know you don't have to do anything to draw this it doesn't thoughts on that works agriculture is intervention so it's just like you know Eric Schultz I teach on his farm down in February in Arizona they're watering lettuce at noon in the summer under shade cloth with misters running down the aisles they turn that on it at high noon now that's that's really what it's about so the key to what you're saying those under shade cloth yeah in really I think that's kind of what he's getting really and the shade cloth thing is like you can do it in a variety of different ways some people have a permanent post infrastructure and then they run longshan cloths over the entire field or what Eric does actually Elliot Elliot seldinger does it this way too right where he's got the low tunnels and he'll stretch the fabrics over the low tunnels or caterpillar tunnels you can do you can convert your caterpillar tunnels to shade cloth tunnels in the summer too but but it's it's that with irrigating in the middle of the day on the crop not on the ground so that's where drip irrigation isn't that great I'm gonna keep going until you're done yeah yeah so yeah we can move on oh you're ready yeah okay well I I can talk about well you know what I can talk about kale and chard but they're really not that much different from what what ray is doing here with with the collards the harvesting is exactly the same on the kale more or less you know you're harvesting the bottom leaves and it's it's really the same thing one thing I was going to actually add to what Ray said about his little technique with the elastics to keep the the count in the bin equal the way we do it on our farm is we we harvest in these totes similar to those yellow totes you saw over there and we have each crop has a certain amount of units per tote that's how we keep track of the count so when I harvest bunched radishes in totes it's it's 12 or it's 24 radishes per tote when we did kale it was the same so that way it's like we just count totes and we know what's in there and so like when it's when somebody's going on the field we say hey that's 12 per tote that's 24 per tow whatever it is that's how we did it but it's more or less the cheating the same thing it's just it's just a way of you know it's just quality control for for counting your harvest and then one thing we landed ization thank you as well as it works you have an apron and we'll have the all like all for 150 in there and then so all about 20 bunches will be in there so it's just all right there that's great so when you've done your elastics you know what you did that's great that's a great idea I've never heard that before but I like that this is Dino kale okay yep yep so you know it's all the same stuff you're generally harvesting the bottom leaves and you know sometimes like you can see the the flea beetle will go to the bottom stuff cuz it's been there the longest so sometimes what I'm doing is I just like get rid of that stuff right away I just I just pull it and just cuff it on the bottom and then harvesting is just getting all this stuff down here and you know you can just you're going on a count usually like like Ray said it might be ten or fifteen leaves or whatever elastic band cut that well I I used like the only way I ever sold bunch scale or the Dino kale or winter red boar was at the market and so we would bunch it all rough like this in the field and then at the market as we were packing it we'd cut it right before it went on the shelf that way that the ends of it stayed clean as long as possible that's just like that's something that we that we realize just from customer feedback and that's that's the neat thing about a market garden when you're selling directly to the end-user is if you're smart and you listen you're gonna take everything you hear from your customers at least the important ones and you're gonna apply that to your protocols in the field because you're going to constantly double down on the unimportant things that they want and do more of that then you're gonna sell more product that's a constant process is listening to your customers yeah yeah that's a good question and it's a context thing some people will say yes in a highly does disease potential area you probably would or pessary you probably could make a case for removing it I've never noticed it myself because generally the pests won't go for things that are on the ground but I have different pests than you guys down here my only my only pest issue with with Brassica crops like this is a fence I don't I don't have flea beetles or I don't know what else eats this stuff cut worms or horn worms or yeah like just it different paths everywhere right yep but most growers I know don't grow this crop with the insect netting on it they insect net the whole thing so crop gets transplanted it gets netted immediately and all that insect netting is weighed down to the ground so much that nothing nothing's crawling underneath it some growers will use a tool to bury the netting like even the big conventional farmers are not conventional but large-scale organic farmers in Southern California their tractor will be planting laying down drip plastic mulching at while laying down drip and Transplant at the same time as well as burying an insect netting onto the edge all at once that's what the big scale organic guys do in California we did it first yeah so down here it probably creates more humidity and heat yeah we this past summer we had some glue that issues with just none of it air flow so that's why we're switching to sprain I mean you know I mean basically what we panicked would do like a rig Allah if you have been sick day down here the crops just gonna melt just as easy you can't even so for us that's either you either spray it or just wait till fall back that's your options or you can stick like like you can stick little you know computer pans in there and help you know the movement if you want they'll like that the market gardeners at least they will just not grow crops that are too problematic at certain times of the year so sometimes that's like well we won't grow rubella during the summer or we won't grow it during the spring because there's too much flea beetle pressure it all depends there's again so many variables to where you live is the climate you're in the certain types of pests that are around there's just so many different ways you can go about doing it but the easiest solution is just to not do it at certain times a year what I what I started doing been four or five years into my farming careers I just wouldn't grow kale during the summer so I would I would be transplanting in March and I'd be growing it hard until second week of July and as soon as that aphid pressure started coming out comment on I pull the crop out and then I started another crop immediately in my nursery to get transplanted out in August that'll be my winter crop but I pull it all out of the field in summer just cuz a food pressure it's just not worth it and for me that demand would go down in the summer anyways and the crop doesn't taste is nice when it's really hot so it was just like it's easier just to not do it free up that space or something else cuz the demand isn't there and it's you got a wall if you got a fits it's so much labor to wash it it's hardly worth it so it's just you know one of those things you just you look at your losses and just and just analyze what's worth doing and what isn't so hit one thing I want to add as you can see I'm actually leaving we actually haven't been printing this on on our pick list yet just cuz we wanted to get as big as we can before fall now when it started to start doing it as you can see obviously these low leaves are I've been leaving these are the quality in our context we actually have someone who works two three hours a week in exchange for food here so we'll have her come behind in that like hey come through here get out the low yellow yellow leaves and it doesn't take it long so my context I would have you know someone read that for me versus me doing that the other thing I think what Curtis was saying about you know every climb in this country he's gonna have different pest issues and I would just encourage you know he talked about like he asked this list of ten growers that he pays attention to I would see if one of those growers are in your area and you know talk to them find out what are they doing and that's you know that's what's great about Instagram right now is a lot of good growers are on Instagram you can learn a lot by just following do it's crazy III watch I'm I'm ripping off stuff from other farmer that all the time and I've always watched and what they're doing because the learning never stops right and there's somebody might be on to the next thing before you you give my taking years to figure it out that's what's so great about social media today is like we can all learn together at the same time a little bit chard chart charts chart can be a great crop pretty low value for me but what you know transplanted in the same density is the collards and the kale so you can use the same fabrics and I find that what I do is there's two different ways I harvest the chard if I want to go if I'm doing a lot of chard and I've got a lot of demand for it which has been rare but there's been times that I did like you can actually cut it like a cut and come again green you can crop it right off as long as you leave about an inch at the crown it'll come back and it'll come back nice and clean there you go what happens with the chard is sometimes you get this you can you can do that but you can also fin harvest it too yep you can come in and break off the outside leaves and thin harvest it certainly cropping it out like that is faster and if you're doing a lot of it it's more worthwhile because what you can do is you staged your beds you could plant like say if you got enough market to move for 100 foot beds of chard let's say this is all chard you'll crop up one bed one week just cut it down you'll crop up the next bed the next week so on and so forth by week four you'll be able to cut that again so you can stage your harvest and that's the cool thing about crops like kale and chard and collards is you don't necessarily have to plant successions like you do greens right that's right you don't have to plant kale and chard every week you can plant kale and chard once every two months and you state you see the succession is in your harvest strategy not in your planting strategy with the quick growing crops we're gonna go we're gonna head over to all those right pretty soon here that's when the planting strategy is crucial but this stuff you know a couple times a year a couple times a season is all you need to do yeah one thing on the chard is that the way we do it is Curtis is right like you know coming through the spring like literally one plant you know this stuff grows crazy fast in the spring so it is just so much faster grab the whole bunch cut it ban it and go and it'll in two weeks like it's ready to go again and the fall we switch to a just picked one leaf at a time just because it takes a lot longer to grow back and so we want to leave more more vegetation to collect as much solar energy as possible yeah in the fall winter that's what we do that's great because you don't have the heat units in the fall winter you get cool nights and stuff things just grow slower your days are getting exponentially shorter so that's that's that's good context right there that's perfect for understanding the two different strategies and what why you'd harvest it in different ways so that's it for the the brassicas and the chard we're gonna what what's up same exact same rake and with the kale I find it's easier I'll just take the whole plant yup that would just broke in half that's why I don't do that you can do that but these aren't yeah these are probably like a September or something actually what this is interesting is that these four beds were really really hard really weedy so what we did is this was really heavy clay so we like man we're just gonna change the soil structure so we added 10 wheelbarrow loads of compost to these two beds and what we found is we just had overhead and it was enough water to keep those roots hydrated in August and early September and so we lost a lot of plants the plants just seemed weak because what we do have good compost but it's not truly broke down rich ready to go so we drop down to I think three we brought loads of compost on these two beds and they actually look way way way way much better on this here so you know too much compost if it's not broke down well is gonna actually hurt you then actually help so that's kind of less than that we learn you know pass it on so so yeah so in here these planters aren't strong I've never done that when that's when that's the case when they're not strong like this is for me this is what Mike the spring would look like in this it later like late spring or early summer there are a lot more robust tea you can do exactly a tray talking will just dress it down if that's what they do in Southern California when you see all those guys in the field they're just going but here you got to be more selective so you might just grab you grab a few leaves at a time you know so it takes a little bit more time right and you know it's a dainty or bunch too it's a smaller bunch so yeah you know and are you gonna sell any of that you want or whatever we'll just take it home yeah so that that's it for these ones yep any more questions on that [Music]

Channel: Urban Farmer Curtis Stone

Views: 53,217

Rating: 4.9205298 out of 5

Keywords: gardening, how to, growing, urban farming, spin farming, vegetables, greens, growing better, high yield crops, get started, sustainable, soil, local, permaculture, off grid, homestead, kelowna, curtis stone, curtis, green city acres, profitable farming, the urban farmer, suburban farming, convert lawn to garden, bc, canada, urban agriculture, market gardening, chard, collards, kale, organic gardening, vegetable gardening, cash crops, make money, rose creek farms, ray tyler, farm, agriculture

Id: ZkUhLoy9Pjo

Length: 19min 44sec (1184 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 05 2017