- Hey, hey, what's going on? As you can see, there's a
different background behind me than in my other videos. I'm gonna be shooting a lot of me talking the A-roll stuff from my home office now. So that's super exciting and
what's even more exciting is that I've been able
to pay for this house and for this office
and for all my expenses with my microgreens business. So it's amazing to see how
far my microgreens business has come and I'm sure that
you are probably interested in knowing what it entails
to run this business. You know, what am I
doing on a daily basis? So I wanted to make this
video for you to really just show you what I'm doing
in the mornings, right? I'm gonna make a few videos
like this but I wanted show you my AM chores, my morning tasks. This is what I do every single
morning, it doesn't change and this is one of my responsibilities that I still do for my
business at this point. I'm working less than 10 hours a week and I'm still pulling a
salary of over 60 grand from that business. So it's definitely working out well and this was one of my goals
when I started my business, I didn't wanna be working,
you know every day, slaving over the business. I wanted to have a business
that can kind of run itself and have my freedom of time. So, and there's nothing
wrong with, you know working a lot of hours for your business. Of course, it's totally
fine in the beginning and maybe that's what you wanna do. You know everybody's goal is
different for their business but one of the things
that was important for me is working less, but still making money. So, I'm excited to show you
right here in this video exactly what I do in the mornings
when I head into the farm. For the best microgreens content, be sure to subscribe to my channel and ring the bell that
way you get notified on Tuesdays when I come out
with new microgreens videos. So I've been running my
business for a few years now. I'm in my fifth year of business
and it's been going great. Like I said before, you know, one of my goals was to
not spend all my time slaving over the business but
was to make it more hands-off, something that could
bring revenue in for me but I didn't really have
to be there all the time or be working all the time. One of the things that
I got really good at is designing systems and
putting these systems in place to get the things done and
to keep the business moving and then you know, kinda have
other people do that work and that type of thing. But, with that being said
I do still wanna keep a little bit hands on with the business and I wanted to show you
in this video, you know what I do in the morning, I'm
gonna take you step-by-step through the process, so
let's jump right into it. All right, we're hearing
the Finest Foods Urban Farm. I'm gonna do some morning chores. These are the morning tasks
that I do every morning. It's really just getting in
here, washing my hands, you know moving some trays around
the room and then watering is really the morning chores. And then after that it
gets into tray making and harvesting and all
that, but in this video I'm just gonna do the morning chores. (water whooshing) (paper ruffles) All right. I gotta grab a super rack... (rack rumbles) bring it around. Now this is also a great
time to unsoak seeds. It's getting into a
little later in the day, it's around 1230 right now
so I'm gonna unsoak these. This morning I unsoaked my sunflower. So these are already done. I do those at 9 a.m.,
which is a four hour soak. And then I let these wait until after 12 which would be the eight hours for these. And these I always aim
for between eight and 12. (water splashes) So it's between eight and 12 hours on everything besides
sunflower, basically. (container rumbles) (water splashes) I used to just soak my seeds overnight and I couldn't really control how long they were being soaked for. I would just have to do like
an overnight 12 hours thing. But, then I found this controller and this automatically
puts water on my seeds in the middle of the night
or really the early morning so that way I don't have to
worry about doing that manually. And then by the time I get
in at least the sunflowers are ready to be on soaked
so it improves my efficiency and resilience. So I got my board up here. It looks like today is Saturday. We're taking out 10
radish and one micromix. So, it looks like this is them. (cloth ruffles) Wipe off the bottom of the weighted trays so that's ready to go for next time. (rack rumbles) And then I'm wiping these
down to keep the racks as clean as possible. Not only at a super rack, but... the main grow racks out there as well. And you don't want stuff falling into the trays beneath either. (trays rattle) Normally, I would want these
to be a little bit taller when they come out of germination. But the problem right
now is it just got really cold here in New York and
my temperature control throughout the whole
building is not perfect. So my germination room is at 65 right now and I prefer it closer to 68. All right so we got these trays. I'm gonna bring them out under lights. (rack rumbles) It's not much room on that side so I'm gonna come on this side And I'm typically just
looking for a good way to put these out. There's no perfect solution right now so I'm just going to start a new row. (trays rattle) You need those steady trays so you can do one handed tray movements. All right. Looking good. Hey, so I'm sitting
here editing this video and I just realized that my morning chores are different on a harvest
day than on a normal day. So what you're seeing
here is a normal day. If this was a harvest day
at this moment in time where we're putting the
trays out under lights that were in germination, at the same time that we're putting them out
we would also be pulling any trays that were for that day's harvest and we'd be pulling them off the racks and lowering them onto the super rack and then wheeling that over
next to the harvesting station. And the reason being is
that we're pulling them now because we don't want them
to get watered that day. We want the crop to be nice
and dry when it's harvested. And then also a watering is little messy so when you water them, there'd
be a chance of getting water on the canopies of the
trays that were to be harvested that day and that's obviously the opposite of what you want. You wanna be harvesting dry crops. So I just wanted to make this note here that this is a normal day. If it was a harvesting day,
we would be pulling any trays that were gonna be harvested that day off of the racks at this moment
and onto the super rack. (racks rumble) Back to this watering. Always turn off your hose
when you're not using it. I had a hose blow out once,
and if I wasn't in here it would have flooded out the whole place. (hose rumbles) (water splashes) I keep the hose underneath my leg and that prevents the dirty hose from getting near the plants
and touching the plants. Before I jump into the watering though, go down under the comments
for me and just let me know what is your least favorite farm chore? I just wanna know. Please just let me know in the comments what is that one thing
that you just hate doing for your business? If I'm being honest here, I think probably watering is the most annoying thing that I have to do but that's probably because that's like the one
thing I'm still doing every day. The tray making that
I do a few days a week it's only a few days a week. I also love tray making,
so that's not too bad. But then if my, if my worker is out and I actually have to do the harvesting that's a pain in the ass. Although, since I don't
do much harvesting anymore it's kind of refreshing to
get into that groove again. So I have to say overall
watering is the most annoying to me, but let me know in the comments what you hate doing in your farm. (water fizzes) (upbeat music) Watering will vary based
on a few different things. It's based on variety. It's based on how old each variety is. And then also based on
how heavy the trays are when you go to grab them. I noticed that these
were a little bit heavier which means there's more water in that soil and they
don't need as much water (upbeat music) Now as you can see, I'm moving the trays along the shelf as I go
down because that'll prevent any of these little leaves
from being trapped inside the tray right next to it. So I slide over using that little bit of extra space on the rack. And then I'll do this one. And then I'll kinda lift this one off and water and slide it over. I'm keeping this side
down so it's not pinching these leaves but I can still slide it over to here and then let this side down without pinching those leaves. (water fizzes) Just like that. (upbeat music) these sunflowers are pretty developed. They're getting a pretty
decent canopy at this point but I'm gonna top water anyway because I want these holes to loosen up and really get off of the plants. I seeded these very
dense because I'm testing out some new seeds. I didn't really know any better. So I really wanna get
some of these holes off so that way when it comes time to harvest it's not gonna be as big
of a pain in the butt. The plants are getting wet at
that point, but that's okay 'cause we still have at
least another three days before they're gonna get harvested so that's plenty of time
for them to dry back off before harvesting. (upbeat music) This is all my cilantro. This is just one week apart. They probably grow better with two lights versus the one that I commonly use and you can see this tray
actually has more holes on it. And that's because I didn't
leave this in germination as long as this one. So the longer you leave cilantro
in germination the better. It'll help pop off those holes. (upbeat music) Those are just coming out of germination. We put those out this morning
so you wanna make sure to give them a nice hefty water 'cause they haven't
had water in three days since you made the trays. (upbeat music) All right so that's all the watering. It's not done with the whole process yet 'cause we still have
to wipe off the holes. I'm gonna do that right now. But as you can see, I
mean, I got that done in about 15 minutes and there's
well over a hundred trays. So this doesn't take that much
time to do watering this way. You don't need an
automatic watering system especially when you're
first getting started. I mean, I've been in
business for four years. I'm definitely at scale and even still, this type of watering is
totally working for me. All right. Try not to get this tangled. Always turn that off and then
we'll go swipe some holes. So you always wanna start
off with your cleanest, your oldest plants and
then just get down in there and ruffle them up. (leaves ruffle) Is it annoying? Yes. Is it a deal breaker? No. Can you still make money
growing sunflowers doing this? Yes. And I mean, look at these
trays, this is complete fluff. We're probably pulling
two pounds off of these and I sell that for 40 bucks. So a little bit of time each day does not add up to
anything close to 40 bucks. Some of the plants will
get damaged a little bit. That's all right. Gotta get these holes off though otherwise harvesting is crazy. That'll take forever. This doesn't take that long. (leaves ruffle) All right so you just saw exactly what I'm doing in my mornings
for my microgreens business to keep it running smoothly. I hope it was useful to see, you know what I'm doing in the farm
and how I'm running it and how I'm doing some
of these more chores. So hopefully that was helpful for you. I hope it was. But if you want more information and want just kinda
like a more deeper dive on specific topics in the
microgreens business world, definitely go check out
the product I launched with David from Micro Acres up in Canada. The product has been going really well, we've gotten a lot of good feedback and we actually just added in
a kind of like bonus feature to the program where we're
gonna do a live Q and A with all the members once a quarter. So that's a new thing that we're doing starting here in April. So if you haven't already
checked out that program now is probably the best
time to go check it out as we start adding more features into it. So you can find that at
microgreensmentors.com. You'll see a video in there to learn a little bit more about
it but we're also adding this additional feature where
you can ask us questions once a quarter, me and
Dave at the same time. Check out the videos below to learn how to optimize your
farm for the best layout. Or watch the other
video if you wanna learn all the different supplies
and equipment that you need to actually start this
business and run the business. If you liked this video,
be sure to hit that like button below, subscribe
to my YouTube channel and don't forget that you can
use that share button below to share it with anybody
you think this might help. Thanks again and I'll see you next time.
