The CHALLENGE of Harvesting THOUSANDS of Pounds of Tomatoes

Good morning, everybody. How you doing today? My name's Andrew. I'm Daniel. I'm Pop Pop. I'm Matt. I'm Lauren. I'm Ronnie. 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. Welcome back, everyone. It's so nice to have you. We've got the farm market all taken care of this morning. We've got the animals fed, and I went for a quick walk through the greenhouse. Yesterday, we were down here. We were able to get all the strawberries picked, and we got over 200 pounds of tomatoes pulled off this new planting, which, if you ask me, is a great start to harvesting this beautiful crop. Another thing we've done this morning, just a little bit, is go through and clip off some of these runners. We've still got a lot of runners that need to be clipped, but the last thing I'm gonna show you in greenhouse number six is our cucumbers are starting to get some nice size to them, and the cucumbers that are on the hog panels are starting to grow up, though. Very, very exciting times on the farm, but you know what's even more exciting than this? Getting moved on to our first picking job of the day. Callie, tell everyone what Uncle Trey is doing. He's making... So he's taking the tomatoes, he's putting them in here, grinding them up, and then he's gonna cook it all down, right? Yeah. You like spaghetti sauce, don't you? I don't. Yeah. Do you think that's cool, Lily? Yeah? Now, I've done videos in the past of making my own spaghetti sauce, but if you guys are interested in seeing a video like that again, please let me know down in the comments. Well, I can definitely tell where we stopped and started harvesting yesterday. Wow. You can see right here next to me, it doesn't seem like there's that many tomatoes out here, but that's because this is a section where we had gone through and harvested already. Now look at the difference over here. Look at the amount of red that we are finding. Beautiful. Pretty plain to see what our first picking job of the day is gonna be. We are gonna be harvesting tomatoes. I'm gonna be picking some plum tomatoes, and Dad's gonna be picking round, and Matthew and Daniel are gonna be joining us shortly. Today, I brought gloves, trying to keep the tomato tar off my hands. We've been having some real big success with the plum tomatoes lately. The only problem that we have been having is from the amount of moisture that we had received. The tomatoes are not storing as nice as we'd like them to. We're still able to harvest the pink to ripe tomatoes, but once you start harvesting those tomatoes that have been ripening for a long time in the field, and if you wanted to ripen them up a little bit more at home from the amount of moisture they receive, some of them are starting to rot a little quicker than we would like. So that is a little bit of a problem. Usually, we like to harvest the tomatoes and store them a little bit until they're at that perfect maturity for canning, and then bring them out. But we're having to take the tomatoes up and sell them a little on the lighter side to the customers, but it is what it is. Most of the customers understand. For the most part, we have been able to harvest pretty ripe tomatoes out in the field and sell them right away. Like what you're seeing today, I'm not grabbing many pinks or greens. It's mostly just ripe tomatoes. A lot of these baskets, I feel like you could almost just can them right away, which is really, really nice for the customers. Many of you know our tomatoes had a pretty slow start, so the fact that they're all starting to ripen up at the same time, it is a little bit much, but this is kind of what we prepare for. We have a few heavy weeks of tomato harvesting here on the farm, and then it's gone. But I'm enjoying every moment of it. Many of you know this is my favorite job on the farm. And can you really blame me when the plum tomatoes look this nice? What other job would you want to do? That was close. Almost dropped my basket. You know what's worse than picking tomatoes once? Picking them twice. Now, as we're harvesting these tomatoes, we do end up filling the baskets pretty quickly. You're looking at about 30 pounds of tomatoes in every single basket. So these baskets can get some weight to them. We fit roughly 32 baskets on the wagon every time. So every single wagon load of tomatoes you see us pull out of this field is relatively or close to 1,000 pounds of tomatoes. Now, what we try and do is pull one to two wagons out every single day. Now, unfortunately, I'm able to record only three days a week, but just put that into your mind. So we're pulling roughly 7,000 to 8,000 pounds of tomatoes out of this field every single week. Yeah, that is a lot of tomatoes. And believe me, at the height of canning season, we sell every single one. Now, unfortunately, we are still dealing with those problems that the weather brings us. But the fact that we're able to pull 1,000 to 2,000 pounds of tomatoes out of the field every day, it makes me very happy. And when they look as nice as they do, it's not hard to sell them. Look at these plum tomatoes. Now, all six of these baskets came from a span from where Daniel's at right now to the back of the truck. So I picked right there. In one row, and I was able to get six baskets. Just to give you an idea of how many tomatoes there are at some points in this field, this field is absolutely loaded down. And there we have it. We've got an entire wagon completely filled up with tomatoes. Well, I should say it's almost full. It's almost full because Daniel can't count baskets. I mean, he's telling the truth. Daniel was supposed to grab the baskets, but I do have to say that is a beautiful haul for the morning. Those are some really, really nice tomatoes. Can't ask for a much better view than that. We got the tomatoes back to the farm just in time because we got the call that it is lunch. So we're gonna head up and get something to eat. It is lunchtime on the farm. Let's see what we are having. Ooh, it looks like we've got leftover ham. And what's this, Grammy? Ham and bean soup? Oh, baby. We're all finished off with lunch and now we're on our way back out to the fields. We need to get an entire bin of broccoli harvested. I believe this is gonna be our third bin of broccoli that we have pulled from this field. And thankfully, the customers have taken every single head. So we've been able to keep everything nice and fresh back at the farm. Look at this broccoli. Oh, my. Oh, he is... Shoot. Baby. Some of the nicest broccoli I've seen in a really long time. Red cabbage here. Be nice if we could get some side shoots. That's why I'm trying to cut the ones that are overripe. Yeah, we'll take that one. He's cutting through this one like he's cutting through a tree. Flowers in here, the size of a baseball. Yep, they're twisting up. It physically hurts me to leave broccoli out in the field that looks like this. But as you can see up here on the bin, the broccoli's no different. It's absolutely massive. While we were washing and sorting tomatoes, we were discussing what other jobs needed to be done today. And someone had mentioned we could check on the pickling cucumbers. So we decided to come out here, and I'm glad we did because we are finding some really nice pickling cucumbers. Now, in all reality, this job did not have to be done. The pickling cucumbers are growing much slower, so you don't have to pick them as often as we do in the middle of summer. However, we still felt this was a good job that could get taken care of today since everybody is here. So that's what brought us out here. There are a lot more pickling cucumbers than I thought there was gonna be, but you can definitely tell that they are growing a little bit slower. The blossoms look nice. The cucumbers themselves look nice, but they just take a little bit longer to get to a size that we want to harvest them, which is okay with us. We've got so much going on. I don't mind it taking every few days to get some cucumbers harvested. There's a big old jet above us. A little bit of an update for you. There are a lot of pickling cucumbers here. I think there's more than we had originally thought, which isn't a bad thing. We'll be able to find somebody to take them. But the thing that's funny is when we go back to when these were seeded, we direct seeded these into the soil, we ran out of cucumber seed. So we're like, we'll just plant pickling cucumbers instead. You never even know if you're gonna be able to get this late planting harvested. You don't know what the weather's gonna be like. Well, I'll tell you what, I think we planted too many pickling cucumbers. We're a little over halfway, but this is a lot of picking. Don't worry, Andrew, I think they thin out up here. I think they get worse. I think there's more pickles than ever now. The only real concern I have for these pickling cucumbers is that this week coming up, the low temperatures are gonna be dropping down into the low 40s, and our highs are gonna be barely getting out of the 60s someday. So that is not good for pickling cucumbers. That's a little too cold for them. So I don't know what our next picking will be like, but I can tell you the weather is changing. So this is what we ended up with, close to 24 baskets of cucumbers. It took quite a while, but I think we're all pretty happy with it. It's gonna be a lot of sorting, that's for sure. I am now home. I just got a shower. I'm all cleaned up for the night, and it is now dinner time. Thank you everyone for watching, and I will see you next time. Buh-bye!