High-Labor and Low-Labor Crops

0:00Today's episode is brought to you by Modern Grower. Modern Grower is your source for time and labor-saving farm tools, such as the Paper Pot Transplanter, Quick Click Seater, and the Jang Direct Seater. Turn labor some tasks in a free time with tools by Modern Grower. Do you think that maybe that sort of that notion that you have to have all the super high-profitable fast turnover things? That needs to be what you focused on and that you don't bother with these long-season things that you're not going to be able to sell for more than $34 a pound. Right. It all depends on the market. I got to compete with other vegetables that are coming to market. I got to compete with what people can buy in the grocery stores that are a little good to there. Things like our cherry tomato mix. When we come into full season in tomato dose and this year it was May 31st. We had our first tomato. We did tomatoes, I think,

1:06June through October. People will pay the $4 a pound slice or heirloom slice or price because you can't get a fresher, more delicious, you know, actually, or jane tomato, maybe anywhere. Maybe if you spent $20 a pound, you just couldn't find it. So like the fact that it's available right at the farmers market, people are just overjoyed with tomato season. And arguably, tomatoes are one of those things that does have a great high profitability. I'm watching a bunch of Instagrams right now where they're talking about tomato doses. One of their top five crops to grow. And like for us, that is true. We do make a lot of money on tomatoes. I would say maybe it's a fifth of our total year. So it's really important to us. It's like fifth of our sales the whole year. We're probably doing, I don't know, 50, 60, 70 other things also. And a lot of those are not making as much of tomatoes. So arguably, we need more tunnels.

2:11Right? That's the, you know, the argument there. It's like, if it's so successful, just add another tunnel of tomatoes. But tomatoes take so much time, so much. It's a labor of love, really. The tomatoes. You don't really count all your time. I mean, if I was keeping track of all the time, maybe it wouldn't be so profitable. But tomatoes for us is just such a joy to bring me stunning yellow cherry tomatoes. We grow a bunch of different varieties. But there's a crowd favorite out there. These little yellow cherry tomatoes that we grow. And I think that's also, can you talk about the labor that goes into tomatoes? I think that's another potential selling point for some of the other things, the sweet potatoes, for instance, not that they're set it and forget it. You know, you're going through and making sure that, you know, hopefully if you're using like something like landscape fabric, you're dealing with a lot of the weed pressure and whatever. But the amount of maintenance and cultivation work that you need to do is so much less than

3:15something with that. And you know, you don't have to be as super picky and have like this perfect weedless stale seed bed to do a ruggula in or your carrots or whatever. And so I think that's another, yeah, that's another real selling point to some of the other things. Or it's like, you know, it's a lot of work at the beginning. You got to get every all of those squash started and then get them out there and do a little cultivation. But once they sort of take over as long as you can keep the deer out and you can kind of keep the disease and pest pressure to a minimum, you know, they're sort of just there until it's harvest time. And, you know, and then yeah, like with the winter squash from at least from our experience, it's way less picky than like a watermelon when you're like tapping on everyone and you're looking at it and you're like, I think this one's good, whatever. It's just kind of like look at this entire bed of all these butternut squash. They all look like a butternut squash. Obviously, they still have to have some curing time. But there's not a whole lot of question. It's sort of just like a lot of work up front to plant a little bit of work

4:15throughout the season and then harvest it all. And then now you have weeks, if not maybe months that you can sit on these and just kind of keep a steady drip going every single week. Yeah, exactly. There's definitely a whole list of all the crops that we grow that are very similar to that. So, uh, garlic is one that takes like an immense amount of planting time to put down all the we do garlic and then we cover it with a hay from our neighbor. So there's like this, you know, planting effort. But basically it just grows, doesn't need irrigation, gets whatever rain, it gets, hopefully it'll survive all this snow and freezes. And yeah, you wane until it's ready to harvest. And this, this season we're growing a little bit more soft neck garlic that doesn't require cutting all the scapes off. We still love some hardnecks. So we're growing a mix this year. But like last year we did mostly hardnecks. Uh, we weren't able to cut the scapes off. And so we

5:15basically lost a bunch of our garlic last year. Yeah, garlic fall squash is a great one that's very little effort for us. We had a lot of success with Delicata. So Delicata squash actually stores and keeps pretty well. Like it can be kept for a while. But we sold most of it out like really quickly. Like within a couple weeks all of our Delicata for the entire season was sold out. Um, it's just such an attractive like almost personal size squash that has just such a unique sweet flavor. It has this beautiful yellow and green stripe. So it's very like eye catching in the booth. Um, if you're looking for something in addition to like a butternest squash is something the butternest squash. I wish the outside was the color of the inside. You know, the outside is a little dull. So it doesn't have that like vibrancy. But Delicata have this stunning yellow almost like a sunburst yellow to them. Um, so those were really popular for us potatoes.

6:20Of course, you plant them and you wait for them to be ready to harvest basically. There's so many things like that that are completely the opposite of tomatoes do it every day coming in trellis every day, kind of all the suckers every day. Um, you even almost have to like watch your harvesting. Like when we were in peak tomato, July, uh, we would actually go down every single day and harvest all the blushing slicers because what we would find is if you wait one more day until it's like perfectly fine ripe, it's cracked. Yeah. It's like, it's like, if you water just the one minute too much and now it's cracked and now it looks like a cracked tomato, which you know, then could start some weirdness several days later and then get a little moldy spot. But, um, yeah, for us, the perfect spot was like this blushing spot where it was just come just enough to get harvested. But you give it maybe two days in the walk in before market and then it's perfect.

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