WE DO THIS ONE THING FOR A BETTER TOMATO HARVEST

good morning everybody how you doing today my name is andrew i'm tracy i'm mimi i'm megan i'm aunt becky i'm grandpa i'm daniel and we're some of the veggie boys and girls and we'd like to thank you for stopping by welcome back everyone it's so nice to see you at the moment we're finishing setting up the farm market the last few days here at the farm market have been very very busy and we have some picking to do since we got the farm market all set up the last thing we need to do before we can head out to the fields is get the animals all taken care of just got the chickens fed and got the eggs collected two nice baskets of eggs daniel got a little bit of a head start down here this morning while we were finishing up in the farm market daniel was taking care of the cattle so daniel got the cattle finished and then he came in and helped me collect the eggs and then dad just got the calves finished now this morning we brought two bins with us not because we have a lot of orders just because we've been selling a lot of sweet corn when it comes to sweet corn harvest what we'll normally do is we will go through and harvest all the ripe ears and then we'll come through and chop the stalks for cattle feed but what we're doing different today is we're walking through some of the corn that we had already harvested and we're grabbing those second ears the sweet corn we raise at max usually puts on about two ears and those two ears are when you're having a good season where the weather is really nice uh because it's been dry we've only been able to harvest one ear but that's okay with us uh we look at it as extra feed for the cattle because we come through and chop everything that we hand pick anyway so any ears that we don't take they just become cattle feed and we factor that in when we plant the sweet corn so that we can always make sure that we're making a profit and we're able to feed our cattle there [Music] yeah just got our two bins of sweet corn now this is the bread and butter the yellow and white bi-color and now we need to head up to the white corn and we need to pick a few baskets of that [Music] now if you can't tell the sweet corn we're in right now this white sweet corn is very very tall i mentioned it in one of my previous videos when we pick in here it's like being in the jungle just a jungle of sweet corn we got finished with the white corn relatively quickly the white corn is on that side this is yellow corn so we have plenty of yellow and white uh you'd be surprised how often people ask for the sweet corn even though it's not as common as it used to be people ask for it all the time but that's okay with us there's no difference to me whether i'm picking yellow corn white corn or the bi color it all tastes great two things are giving me concern right now one i smell a skunk two those dark clouds i don't know what that means [Music] we got to remember yellow corn on this side white corn on this side don't want to get them confused now when it comes to the yellow corn we don't sell as much so dad do you think it's worth it to raise all this yellow corn it's a hassle but we have a few older customers that really enjoy it so we do it for them just gotta get a run and start the run and start isn't usually a problem problem is when the farm market's full trying to get through with the pallet jack that was a big job accomplished because we actually had like no sweet corn out in the farm market so now we have two bins in here that that's plenty to sell for today our green bean bins empty we gotta pick a bin of green beans there you go that's something important that we need to do right now i'm helping matthew load up his truck he has to take an order to one of the local grocery stores and uh they also got some moms so we're getting his truck loaded up and then we're gonna head back and pick beans dad and daniel left a few minutes before me and they got started picking green beans i can show you the plants really quick there is a lot of beans hanging here this plant fell over because there's so many beans on it we're going to come through and harvest it but this plant loaded with beans they're just loaded [Music] all the green beans are now harvested we do need some yellow and some italian flat beans so we're moving over to that section of the field to harvest those next [Music] got our four baskets of italian flat beans now we need yellow beans this job isn't too difficult when the machine is set up correctly you need to have the fan moving fast enough that it blows out all the debris but it doesn't blow out any beans so you have to find that happy medium to where you're getting plenty of beans and no debris and my job here is if any debris does make it through i got to pull it out we want to try and keep the beans as clean as possible and that does sound like a relatively easy job but when there's a lot of beans coming in it can be difficult we had a little bit of an issue while we were harvesting the yellow beans we have two plantings over there one newer and one older planting now the older planting the beans are starting to get a little on the rougher side which happens as the beans get later on in their growing cycle but the newer beans aren't a hundred percent ripe yet so we did have to pick off all the older beans but as you can see these older beans do look really really nice and they have a good flavor it's just as the beans get older you'll start to see something called rust in them and rest is when there's a discoloration in the bean it does affect the flavor a little bit and it doesn't look as nice that newer planting in the next like three to four days will be basically all yellow we were just trying to get a jump start now before we move on to our next job i get a lot of questions about how this machine works now the driver's job is to get the bean plant to go right into the housing there are guides here that guide it into the housing now inside this housing are a bunch of metal fingers that strip everything off the plant when you harvest with this machine it is a one-time harvest the machine completely strips the plant and takes everything all of the beans and plant debris then follow this conveyor up into the fan there is a fan in here that is driven by a pto and that sucks up all the plant debris and the smaller unripe beans and shoots them out the fan and then the beans that are too heavy and don't get blown out of the fan follow our conveyor and drop right into our baskets it's a neat machine and i'll be honest with you it's probably my favorite machine on the farm but anyway it's time to move on to our next job enough talking about the bean picker i love that bean picker all right andrew knock it off come on get to work dad and i went for a little walk over to the pickling cucumbers now the boys were harvesting the pickling cucumbers yesterday but we had a very very busy day yesterday so we weren't able to finish off the rose so while dad and i are waiting for someone to come back with a wagon or a truck to pick up the beans we're gonna harvest pickling cucumbers [Music] [Music] why don't you just help us pick we only got like 20 minutes till lunch time [Music] and i only have four baskets now because we have a lot of people that watch the channel sometimes i like to talk about the varieties we raise now the variety of pickling cucumbers we have here is called eureka now if you've been watching for quite some time you've heard that name before we've been raising eureka cucumbers for a few years as long as i can remember and the reason why we've been raising them for that long is because they always do well for us now here's the thing i want to tell you what varieties we raised but just because they work for us doesn't mean they'll work for you so i don't know what your climates are i don't know where you live but my suggestion is always try out a few different varieties of each crop see which one works best for you and then use that one that's what happened with these eureka pickling cucumbers we were trying out a few varieties and we found something we enjoy so we kept using them [Music] yeah oh i was livid dad living living why were you living the stupid tomatoes slid off the skid [Music] matthew got back from his deliveries he has now joined us daniel was loading up some straw for a company so now all of us are picking pickling cucumbers together [Music] what's that old saying uh pick cucumbers while the cucumbers are ripe that's what i say i think you mean make hay while the sun shines andrew but you can apply it to cucumbers it's not pick cucumbers while the cucumbers are right make hay while the sun shines what hey it works anyway right right it works anyway that works fine okay good i was concerned we got two rows of the pickling cucumbers completely harvested we have one left but we want to get all this stuff picked up because it is lunchtime some nice looking beans good job getting these beans picked andrew you're welcome i did it all by hand that's what we like to see beautiful beans and some beautiful pickling cucumbers [Music] now as you guys have seen today we've harvested some really nice stuff and some people seem to think that we can grow anything here on the farm but one thing we can't grow without your help is this channel so if you're new here please consider subscribing and if you're already subscribed liking the video helps us out a ton and i appreciate it [Music] we got everything brought into the cooler now we're coming in for lunch it looks like we have chicken and tuna fish sandwiches what do you got there jalapenos jalapenos we had no jalapenos in the farm market so dad and daniel quick ran and grabbed a basket after lunch this is what the cooler is looking like right now we're gonna have to find time to sort all this stuff but we have more picking to do [Music] grandpa just got in trouble do you want to tell them why you just got in trouble i'm not in any trouble yeah he was teaching cali to pull stuff off the shelf yeah he's gonna get her in trouble i'm never sure what we're doing for the afternoon it always changes but what i was told was we are picking off the rest of those pickling cucumbers and then we need to get some round and plum tomatoes and something else is always like thrown in the mix there maybe today will be different i don't know but we'll probably find something else to do as well [Music] i'm starting at the tire on the truck okay [Music] [Music] we got all the pickling cucumbers harvested and loaded onto the truck dad is taking them home so they don't have to be out in the heat and you heard me mention that we needed to harvest tomatoes now this is our last planting of tomatoes but some of the plum are starting to ripen up so we want to get them harvested while we're here [Music] [Music] don't tell matt but i'm stealing tomatoes out of his row okay keep that between us [Music] finding some nice tomatoes out here a lot of green tomatoes though uh we just wanted to pick through and take everything that was ripe just just to be safe they're calling for showers and that could split tomatoes i don't think it's gonna happen but just to be safe we're trying to pull all these ripe ones off [Music] you know what's worse than picking tomatoes once picking them twice and the worst part is with tomatoes you got to make sure none of them got any holes in them now i don't know how this happened we just got finished with picking tomatoes in this little section it's still really early for these tomatoes to be harvested but we're happy with what we got and we're even happier because we see how much potential is there for example when you move these plum tomato plants around all you see is green tomatoes so look at this ripe one that's a beautiful one i see is more tomatoes coming we have moved over to a different planting of tomatoes and they look really nice now these plants were almost planted a month earlier than the other ones so that's why they're so much further along [Music] now in market farming and vegetable farming there is many challenges that the farmer can face and one of the biggest challenges is just growing a nice crop and for example tomatoes can have a lot that can go wrong for example there's all the different diseases that tomatoes can get for example there's early blight light blight phytophthora cat face blossom end rot downy mildew powdery mildew and those are just a few we could go on forever talking about diseases not only do we have those diseases that we have to deal with but we also have the weather and animals that can give us a lot of problems and that weather can be a very very big problem especially with tomatoes uh we were watching the weather this morning and they said we could get 60 to 70 mile an hour winds and an inch of rain in less than 15 minutes you know what that does to tomatoes that could cause these tomatoes to split with all those things that i just mentioned and all the other problems that could go wrong some people may ask why do you want to even farm them and the easy answer is i just don't know how to do anything else i've been farming my whole life and i'd ask my dad like what he would do but you know he's been farming his whole life our family has farmed this ground since the 1850s so that that's kind of cool now i'm not telling you all this stuff to try and discourage you from farming or starting a garden i don't think there's a better way of life i really enjoy what we do it is a lot of hard work and it is a lot of uncertainties but i really enjoy it and i wouldn't want to be doing anything else the reason why i shared all that with you is because i wanted to share one thing that we do that really helps us to fight disease and that thing that helps us out so much is rotating our crops now unfortunately if you have a smaller garden crop rotation might be a little more difficult for you however we have found that it really helps to prevent disease now there are some crops that are affected by the same disease but there are certain crops that aren't affected by certain diseases that tomatoes get now rotating is very important to us because if these tomatoes were to have a disease and die we always till them under into the soil at the end of the year so technically that disease is still into the soil so what we like to do is wait three to four years before we put tomatoes back in the same spot and if you have a garden i'm not saying you should only plant tomatoes every three years i'm saying in our circumstance where we plant 60 to 70 000 tomato plants every year it's a little more likely for us to deal with disease pressure but it's still important for you to rotate things around in your garden keep of note of where you plant things and then try and work with that in the following years and we're fortunate that we raise so many different types of crops that we can rotate everything effectively and that's something we have found that really helps us to fight disease and maybe that's something you could use if you have a small garden or maybe if you even farm a few acres crop rotation very important [Music] i just got our last basket of tomatoes filled and if you look over there [Music] we did it at the perfect time because there is storms coming [Music] daniel there are storms coming i don't see it [Music] that chicken over there is one of the chickens with like the cool pants on i like those chickens [Music] i'm not saying i could drink a whole jar of salsa i'm just saying i could eat a whole jar of salsa andrew you're one odd boy well if you were to ask me i think we got done at perfect timing this is pretty nice yeah it's wet it's wet all right we just got done taking care of our last customer and now it's time to start putting stuff away we just spent the last 30 minutes moving stuff around inside the cooler trying to take pallets out moving bins around hopefully we can fit everything in tonight [Music] we're closing in on a half inch i'm happy about that we have made it up into the house grammy what are we having for dinner tonight milo mashed potatoes acorn squash and corn hey wow you are messy tonight how are you doing behind your door do you have my pants alrighty we now have everybody at the dinner table so you guys know what that means this is where we're gonna end the video today i'd like to thank everyone for watching and i hope to see you next time bye bye

Channel: The Veggie Boys

Views: 162,591

Keywords: vegetable farming, the veggie boys, theveggieboys, vegetable farmers, family farm, real farming, how to farm, farm vlog, farming vlog, homesteading, homestead, farmers, day in the life, my day, day on the farm, a farmers life, farm life, farming life, american farmers, life on the farm, veggies, vegetables, big vegetables, growing tips, farm hack, garden hack, amazing, tomatoes, tomato hacks, vegetable tips, farming tips, garden, garden hacks

Id: H_WeZnWOhRI

Length: 21min 21sec (1281 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 04 2022