This Planting Method Saved Our Sweet Corn

Good morning, everybody. How you doing today? My name's Andrew. I'm Daniel. I'm Pop Pop. I'm Callie. I'm Lauren. I'm Lenny. And we're some of the Veggie Boys. And girls. And we'd like to thank you for stopping by. If you're new here, please consider subscribing because we can grow a lot of stuff on the farm, but one thing we can't grow is this channel without your help. You carry these. Can you carry those? Yeah. All right, good man. Hi, are you working with Bubby today? Already 90 degrees in the germination greenhouse this morning. We've got a planting here of bell peppers that's coming out of the soil. Those are some nice germination rates. Boy, does it look pretty in here, Aunt Bonnie. I love it. And I need your help. Oh, okay. Are you planting watermelons this morning? Yep. Oh, how exciting. Welcome back, everyone. It's so nice to have you with us. Currently working on morning chores. We've just about got all the animals taken care of. All things considered, the animals seem to be doing really, really well. And the chickens, they're still laying lots of eggs. We recently moved some more cattle into this pen and they seem to be doing well. And over here with our pastured pen, these cattle seem to be doing really well. Also, they've been eating a lot of grass. What's going on back there? When the grass is growing as fast as it is, I'm happy about it because, you know, that's free food. One big thing I need to do is bring all of you out to the fields. We need to look at how things have been growing. We need to talk a little bit about the sweet corn. Before we can do that, we got to finish off with morning chores. Here in greenhouse number five, I found a few spots where things are looking a little dry. Nothing too major yet. Look at these tomato plants. Beautiful. And then look at these cherries. Look how fast they're growing. Wow. Daniel, tell them the whole reason I needed to come back here. I need to wait in the back of it so I can get up. He said, I need some help. And when I get here, I'm like, what do you need help with? He's like, can you just sit on the back? That's all he needed. Oh, baby. Things seem to be going smooth for Daniel. That old disc is a little lighter than we'd like it to be. But hey, it gets the job done. One thing I will say, that ground he was working on is for sweet corn. We're going to be putting more sweet corn over there. And when he got done right here next to our sweet corn that was under the bio-mulch, we're going to be doing a few more rows of the bio-mulch sweet corn. Now this specific field right next to me is an exciting one. This is going to be the last field Daniel works up for the day. He already went through and got it plowed, but the moldboard plow can leave things looking a little rough. So he's going to come over the top of the disc and tomorrow we're going to be planting coal crops. How exciting is that? This specific section is where a bulk of our coal crops are going to go this year. And I am very, very excited about that. I've got a big problem. What's your big problem? Somebody forgot the strap over on the hill. I got to go get it. Oh no. There you go, boss. We're heading out to plant a little more sweet corn. And dad told me specifically, we have to use this shovel. This little green one. I don't know why Daniel's been using it, but now I have to use it. I'm going to be the guy that broke the other shovel. Now a quick explanation of what we've got going on. We're doing another planting of sweet corn. As you can see right next to me, these are actually two separate plantings already. So this is kind of like a third. The planter unit and mulch laying combo has been super beneficial for us for so many different reasons. The ultimate goal here is to try and get sweet corn a little bit earlier. And you can see what this planter does a little bit different than some other planters. It's actually digging two separate trenches and planting the seed at the bottom of the trench. Now we've already seen why this is beneficial. It gives the seed plenty of room to grow. The other day when our temperatures dropped really, really low, if we didn't use this planting method, we would have lost everything. Yeah, it's pretty unfortunate. Everything that was touching the mulch, it did get burnt a little bit. However, we're still going to be able to have a crop, which is super nice. Now this planting method, it isn't just all benefits. There are some things that we have to deal with. One, an elevated cost. We need to own an extra piece of equipment. And the last thing, this job can be a little difficult. It requires a few extra people, not like just planting with the regular corn planter. One thing I love about this planter is it actually has a platform that we can stand on. Makes it a lot easier on your feet. Sometimes I do have to move from one side to the other. If for some reason there is a grade in the field, I want to be on the lower side to make sure enough soil is getting put on top of the mulch. I can see a few holes in the mulch over there. It looks like we had some deer walking through our sweet corn field, because there are some more holes, like going in an angle across the field. That happens sometimes. Nothing too bad. We can live with it. The most important thing for us is making sure that the bed is completely covered with soil. I mean, if we have our mulch just blowing off the sweet corn, what's the point? So we want to make sure we're getting enough soil on each side so no wind can get underneath it and blow it away. Now, I do like to mention this. The number one ingredient in this bio-mulch that we're using today is cornstarch. It's super photo-degradable. So that means the sun is breaking it down from the time that we put it in the soil. And it ultimately breaks down completely, which is super beneficial. And for us, it's a game changer. We've got this section of field all planted. Pop-Pop is taking the planter back to the farm. Now, I had mentioned earlier on in the video, I actually wanted to come out here and talk about the sweet corn anyway. So this is a perfect opportunity to do so. The first thing I want to mention is there's so many people that wonder, how does this stuff get water if we're putting the mulch over the top? You know, what's going to happen to the plants when they come up? Well, it's actually pretty interesting. The number one thing is all the moisture that these plants need is actually in the soil already. You can see this mulch was just laid and it's already starting to cloud up. That's because it's heating the soil underneath the mulch and the moisture can't evaporate. It can't evaporate up into the atmosphere. It hits the mulch and it stays in there and creates a greenhouse effect. A good example is you can see this first row, it's already starting to cloud up. Then we go over to this next row. Well, that one, it's already getting moisture sitting on the mulch. And this was the first row that we did. I can actually hit it and you can see the moisture falling back down onto the soil. And if we wait even longer than just 15, 20 minutes, the moisture really does start to build. This was some sweet corn we planted not that long ago and you can see the amount of moisture that is sitting on this mulch. It's so much more than what we had just planted. So I hope that answers that question because I get that question all the time. Another question I get is, why is there holes in the mulch? This is actually a design from the planter. These little holes that are left helps with the process of breaking down the mulch. But ultimately what I wanted to talk about, I have to take a little walk because it's a few rows up. Here you can see the sweet corn that we planted first. We're just gonna pull back this mulch. Look at that, wow. You can see this is where the damage was to that sweet corn. It's kind of left a couple of those leaves translucent. But the most important part, the center of the plant seems to be okay. Now the frost that came through, it definitely was a heavy frost. And that frost, it sat right on top of this bio-mulch. And as we've mentioned multiple times, it has done some damage. When the temperatures drop that low, these young plants with these tender, tender leaves, they just, there's not much they can do. They get hit super hard. And a big issue is there's so much moisture in these plants. And when that moisture starts to get so cold, it leaves like a brown or even a blackening. It burns the plants essentially. The only thing that protected this sweet corn was the way we planted it underneath the bio-mulch. If we didn't have the bio-mulch, well, it would have been wiped out. Now it's not all sunshine and rainbows as much as I'd like it to be. We have received a small setback because of the cold. But as long as we don't get another hard frost, which it's definitely not looking that way, I think our sweet corn will be completely fine. There are areas where it doesn't even look like the sweet corn was touched at all. Ultimately, I would be pretty upset if we lost this because this is a lot of extra work. And it's not like we're making super crazy profit off of it. Although we did run the numbers, and from this field alone, we should receive anywhere from 30 to 32,000 ears of corn. Now those numbers are based on the length of the field and the population of the sweet corn that we planted. So if we were able to get 20,000 ears of corn, I'd be a happy man. I'm just happy that we were able to get out here today and look at the sweet corn in a little bit more detail and see that overall, sweet corn crop is gonna be just fine. I brought Ronnie with me to work today. Mommy had to go get some dresses. We've got something coming up in a week and a half and we're gonna be going together as a family and we all need to look nice. So the babies are getting new dresses and mommy's getting a new dress. So that means Ronnie had to come to work with me. Do you like going to work with daddy? Give me five. Yeah, give me a big five. Do you think mommy would like these? Yeah. Yeah, what about this one? Do you think mommy would like that one? Yeah, and this. Hmm. What about Lily and Callie? Would they like this? Yeah. Yeah, I like purple. You like purple? Yeah. What about yellow? Do you like yellow? No, pink. You like pink and purple? What about red? Do you like red? Nope. All right, whatever. The real reason why I brought Ronnie down here was because I wanted to look at some of these cherry tomatoes. It's kind of hard to see all the way down there, but there is tons of blossoms. They're gonna start forming tomatoes relatively shortly and the second people start seeing tomatoes on them, forget about it. They're gonna be gone. It's with kids, but Ron put some right to sleep. I think he's about to come. Look at what we've got going on over here. We got some babies sitting down at the table eating their dinner. It's been a crazy busy day. Mommy was out running around. You got dresses for the babies? I did. Ooh, are they pretty dresses? Beautiful. Oh, wonderful. And I am currently cooking chicken on the grill. Very, very exciting. Dinner time is here and we are excited to sit down and eat. So that means this is where we're gonna end the video. I'd like to thank everyone for watching and we'll see you next time. Buh-bye! Bye, bye!