Harvesting Our First Sweet Corn of the Season

Good morning, everybody. How you doing today? My name's Andrew. I'm Daniel. I'm Pop Pop. I'm Zuriel. I'm Matt. I'm Ronnie. I'm Callie. And we're some of the Veggie Boys. I know. 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. Beautiful. Callie, do you know what this stuff is for? Making dill pickles. That's good. Welcome back, everyone. It's so nice to have you. Just getting finished off with morning chores. I've got the chickens all taken care of, and I just got greenhouse number six all taken care of. We were even able to find a few strawberries this morning. At this point in the morning, we're just waiting on Dad to finish off feeding cattle, and once he does that, we'll be able to move on to one of our big jobs today, doing some major harvesting. One thing that's gonna make that even more enjoyable for us is we've got some nice weather today. I will say the animals were affected by the hot, hot weather that moved through last week. The chickens alone have been laying less and less eggs. That's probably the biggest thing I noticed, but as the weather changes and it's cooler for a little bit longer, the chickens will catch right back up. Oh my gosh, whoo! Yeah, this is what we're after. Now, the first job of the day actually brings us out to the berry patch. I thought we were heading out to the fields, but I'm not too upset about being out here right now. These raspberries look beautiful. This is our first year of actually stringing up the raspberries, and I'll tell you what, it has made quite the difference. Usually I dread this job, but today I'm actually enjoying it quite a bit. The berries look wonderful, and the plants are also super healthy, which is making this a lot more fun. Now, a big reason for me as a young kid not liking this job is these raspberry plants actually have quite a few thorns on them, and growing up, I would get cut up quite a bit, and that made me dislike this job. But now that I'm a little bit older, and now that we're starting to plant new varieties of black raspberries, actual thornless varieties, I'm thinking the future harvest will be even better than this one. But I have to say, when you can find clusters of raspberries on your plant that look like this, you know it's gonna be a good day. Look at Zuriel, he is picking so fast. There you go, you wanna give that to Matt? Yeah. That's a nice full one. As you can see, we've got Zuriel back here with us, and how did you enjoy picking black raspberries for the first time? Great. Great. And they taste good. Mm. They are so good. Gotta mix it up. Some red raspberries. Mm. You're pretty good at this, Zuriel. Thanks. Just got finished off with picking our black raspberries. Matthew actually had to go back to the farm and get more pint containers. There was a lot more here than we expected. Grammy had already gone through this morning and got a bulk of the red raspberries picked. And the only thing out here that really hasn't been touched is the blackberries themselves, but these still need a little bit more time till they're ready to go. It's like we're a wilderness explorer. Today is a really big day for us because we are harvesting something that is very, very important, and something that we will end up harvesting a lot more of, and that is sweet corn. What do you think of the sweet corn, buddy? Do you like it? Yeah. Yeah, it's cool. You wanna go over that way? Yeah. I am very impressed with how the sweet corn looks. I think all of us are excited to see the early planting of sweet corn now ready to be harvested. Now, it can be a little confusing when it comes to harvesting corn. What are you supposed to be looking for, and when is the best time to pick? Unfortunately, with sweet corn, there's so many different varieties, and they all mature differently, so it can be kind of difficult to just have a base on when to harvest, but I'm gonna share with you what I look for. The first thing I'm gonna look for, the first telltale sign is the silk itself. If the silk is this brown color and it is dried out, that usually is a good sign that it is no longer creating kernels from the pollen falling off onto the silk and pulling that silk down in there and creating that kernel. So when this is dried out and this is dried out, it's usually a good sign. And now that our silk is brown, that's probably the number one thing I'm looking for when I'm picking. I will then take my hand and I'll put it around the tip of the sweet corn. And if I can feel that the end of the ear is kind of rounded off, it's usually a good sign that the ear is done growing. But just to make sure we did the right thing, we'll pull it back. Yeah, look at that. Beautiful, beautiful sweet corn. So that's what I'm mostly looking for, silk, dried out silk. Once I know the silk is dried out and I can feel the tip of the ear rounded off, I know it's ready to pick. Now this can get difficult, especially when you have deer eating the top of the silk off. But for the most part, that's what I'm looking for with every single harvest. I'm looking for that dried out silk and the rounded top of the ear. So if you learned anything from today's video, it's how to pull an ear of sweet corn. But I'm sure most of you would have figured it out. Don't worry. You're stuck? Just walk right through. Wow, yeah. I couldn't even imagine how much of a jungle this looks to him. Well, you know, Matt, the sweet corn harvesting is half the battle. Tasting it is making sure that's the important thing. Mm. Oh, wow. It's really good. That's good. You want to try it, Zariel? What do you think? Good. Yeah, oh yeah. You want to help me get the ear? Yeah. Here, walk up here. Grab this ear of corn. Take your hand on it. Put it right there and there you go. You just picked your first ear of corn, buddy. You want to hold it? Let's put it in the basket. Here you go. Put it in the basket. Good job. Good job, Zariel. I got a little carried away. Beautiful. We've got a fully loaded side-by-side. We're completely filled up with people and corn. I know the customers are going to be excited about this sweet corn because it looks great and even better, it tastes great. You driving for me? He likes steering the wheel. Oh, don't steer into the corn. Oh, no, there you go. There you go, buddy. He likes driving. Yeah, go ahead. Look who we have here. We have Aurora. Baby. For lunch today, we've got some homemade Jell-O and Grammy has made a whole bunch of grilled cheeses. Ham and cheese. Ham and grilled cheese. There's tomato on grilled cheese. It's going to be a good day. J-Lo. We've made it back out to the fields for the afternoon and we've got a lot of picking scheduled for this afternoon. To get started off, Dad and Daniel, they are working on getting our yellow squash, yellow zucchini, and our green zucchini picked. And my job is a very exciting one because I get to pick something new for the year. Oh, there we go. A little small yet, but maybe we'll be able to find a couple. So my main goal here is to pick anything I can find, but I haven't found any cucumbers. So what I'm thinking is it's just a little too early. Kind of a bummer. I was excited to get those picked. Ooh, we're getting closer. A lot closer. Woo-hoo, I found one. I kept looking because I kind of swore I saw little cucumbers out here the other day. And there we go. We did find one. Wonderful. Is there more coming or? Yeah, there's a lot of blossoms. These definitely are not as full as the zucchini are, but we still need to walk through them because anything that we miss is gonna be way too big next time we come back through them. This is a lot of what we're finding, young ones. And you can see there's a whole bunch in here. Right by your foot. Good thing you told me. I'd have missed it. There's that one. That's what we're looking for. Beauty. We found about a half basket of cucumbers, which is nice. Anything we find at this point in the year is always a good find. Now we're gonna be picking back the other rows where our pickling cucumbers are. We were able to get all of the regular cucumbers picked and we just made our way back to pickling cucumbers. For our very first time picking them, I'm happy with what we got. There wasn't that many cucumbers, but two full baskets of pickling cucumbers at this point in the year. You only see me complaining about that. I'm very happy with it. You'll notice this is normally what the mulch looks like. And this is a row where the deer have been walking down. You can see all the footprints punched through the mulch. Closer to the wooded area, a lot of our first cucumbers and pickling cucumbers that we planted were eaten by the deer, unfortunately. But it's something you have to deal with. And this year it just seems to be bad like last. Look at all that. Not a small deer either. We just made it to the next spot where we're going to be harvesting at. We are going to be picking some green beans. The green beans are looking really, really nice. I don't think it's going to be that hard to get the baskets that we need because they look beautiful. I don't care what anybody says, this is 10 times better than picking peas. Wow. These are delicious. These are the beans that we just got picked. Absolutely beautiful. Hopefully this will hold us over for the weekend. We got back to the farm with the green beans and everything else that we had picked. And we found out we don't have much corn left. Everybody's been excited for our corn. So we decided to come back out and get a whole bunch of corn picked. That way we'll have enough for the rest of today and the weekend. Daniel's got one more basket of corn to pick up. And then we got our eight baskets of corn filled. Should be about close to 400 years, maybe around 350. I hope that'll hold us over. If not, we'll just have to pick tomorrow. We ended up having dinner. We spent some time with Joel and Megan. They came over. And it's late. 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.