Alright!
This is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com, today we’re actually at the Harvest Time
Market Produce You Pick and Garden Center.
Alright so we’re at Harvest Time, let’s see they have a nursery where they have plants
and trees for sale I didn’t see too many edibles there.
They have a produce shack that sells fresh some of the produce they grew here and then
other produce.
They also have a, they make sugar cane juice here, maybe we’ll go check that in a minute.
But the reason why I’m here today is I want to see how they’re growing their you pick
strawberries hydroponically.
And as I see, they’re doing hydroponically and vertically.
So wow man this is a trip, I’ve never seen a set-up like this before, so let’s see
kind of what they’re doing.
So looks like they have these poles mounted to the ground, looks like it’s metal and
then they got PVC on the outside here.
And they have these Styrofoam boxes, like three of them, kind of like what you put your
beer in to keep them cold but they’re like really small.
Actually one, two, three, four, five of them, actually.
And they got them diagonal on top of each other to make small spaces where the roots
come out.
So actually that is pretty close plant spacing actually, it’s maybe about six inches.
And looks like they’re doing really good, look at those ripe strawberries on there.
And the water source, they basically just have a drip tube up here, it’s like a five
eighths drip tube, and let’s see it looks like the water just basically gets injected
into the top here into this dirt.
And then it just kind of maybe trickles down into the different ones.
And look this is cool, it spins, so imagine harvesting these, you’re walking along,
you go to each one you just spin it around, okay ripe one, ripe one, ripe one, okay next.
And you know you’ve got to move around the plant.
Man, this is the most incredible system I’ve seen for growing strawberries ever.
I mean this is really cool, I mean you could do this at your house.
And even the spacing between them, I mean you don’t really need that much space between
them, just enough maybe so it doesn’t shade each other out.
There appears to be about I don’t know, three feet approximately between each set
of strawberry plants, and this way you could get, there’s four, four times one, two,
three, four—16 plants per upright, and then times that by all these.
I mean this is really efficient use of space to grow the most strawberries hydroponically,
well I don’t know if I’d call it hydroponically because there is looks like to be some soil
in there.
No it’s not soil actually it’s a sponge-like material.
So it’s some kind of hydroponic grow medium.
So they are growing hydroponically technically because it doesn’t appear to be dirt.
I’m not going to rip it up and see what they’re actually growing in, but yeah this
is a really nice set-up, I don’t know if they came up with this design or saw it somewhere
else where they’re using it commercially, but man there’s just lots and lots of strawberries
here.
And so for those that are curious, they are not organic here, so they do spray.
So actually I will not be buying any strawberries today, but this is amazing to see how they’re
actually doing it, and you know I’m positive that you could probably do this organically
as well, because you don’t need to spray them pesticides on the food.
Okay now this is the you pick strawberry and tomato field, and it says “Do not eat picked
produce before washing.”
That’s always a good idea when they spray pesticides so let’s see, so here’s how
they grow conventionally, or how I’ve seen it conventionally done strawberries.
And this is similar to how I planted my strawberries but probably closer together.
There’s actually a foot, maybe ten inches between plants here so maybe that depends,
ten inches, a foot between plants and the rows all the way down just fields of strawberries
so this is how they’re conventionally grown in the ground on mounds.
And it looks like they’re doing pretty well here so you know that set-up over there is
definitely unique and really cool you could pack in much more plants, but it’s going
to cost a lot more to set that system up and get it running and to mound up some dirt and
plant it and put some cover on it.
Let’s check out what else they have growing over here.
Alright, now I’m in their tomato fields, and let’s see, this is how they do tomatoes
probably about every two feet they have a fairly thick stake in the ground, and this
is a good example there’s a stake there, we have a stake here.
They just tied it with string, so as the plants got taller they tied it with the string, wrapped
the string around and kept going down and keep the main stalk of the tomato plant between
the plant and they’re probably going to another row of string here although their
stakes aren’t very high.
So I imagine this variety of tomatoes is not a variety that will get really tall, kind
of looks more like a, not a patio but some other variety, I’m not exactly sure what
other commercial varieties there are but they’re the standard red bouncy bounce tomatoes, they
probably don’t get really super-tasty.
But this is an example of how you could stake your tomatoes fairly inexpensively, you know
the stakes are really cheap, and stake them up and use some string almost here to the
end of the bed, and they just have thousands of tomato plants here, I didn’t count how
many, it’s like every foot and this row’s pretty dang long.
And they just have fields and fields of fields of produce growing here.
And next to me here, actually looks like every other row they planted something else so they
have onions growing in this row, let’s see what else they have.
Can you say tomato fight?
I wish I was here with somebody and we’d have a tomato fight with all these rotten
tomatoes on the ground that would be so fun.
Hey post down below if you ever had a tomato fight, I want to know.
I never wanted to waste any of my tomatoes but hey if there’s somebody else’s tomatoes
already rotten, that’d be super fun.
This is how they do their peppers.
The peppers are spaced out about a foot again, ten inches to a foot, and basically this is
how they do it, they put a stake in the ground, and that stake’s probably every six feet
or maybe ten feet, and then they just wrap it with string to guide the pepper plant to
keep it upright because they will tend to kind of bend over, and keep them upright and
I suppose if they grow taller they’re going to put another line of string a little bit
higher.
And there’s fields [inaudible].
They’re growing so many different things here, it’s always nice to come to see how
they’re doing it [inaudible] situation so we can emulate that because hopefully if they’re
doing it for a commercial situation, in most cases if they’re in a commercial situation
they’re doing it for one thing – profit.
And if they’re doing it for profit, then that means they’re going to do whatever
they can do to increase their yield because their yield is in direct proportion to their
profit.
And the quality of the produce has no relationship really to their profit, how many pounds [inaudible]
produce is sold by the pound or the bunch, and so how much pounds of food can you generate
in the smallest amount of space.
So they could probably do things a little bit tighter, and if they did, there would
be more labor.
So it’s always a compromise between labor, spacing, resources, and all the many different
things.
So as a home gardener, you could have the labor, you could do the close spacing and
emulate some of the things that make farming profitable like here on the farm that we see
now, to emulate them like the spacing, like growing it up with the string and the stakes,
but also we can add that quality that they don’t have here that they don’t really
care about so much is the quality or the taste.
Because we’re not going for pounds hopefully, I mean I’m going for pounds but I’m also
important is to me the quality and the taste, I want to have the highest quality produce,
and hopefully you should too.
So we could combine all that because when there’s money involved, once again they
just want to make the profit, and even if they have to spray pesticides or whatever
to make it easier because guess what, when you spray pesticides, it’s easy.
It’s a quick fix.
It’s a solution, it’s not good for us probably to eat those pesticides it’s not
good for the environment for those pesticide residues, it’s only good for the chemical
companies that make those pesticides and the farmers that’s growing the stuff because
it’s really easy to come and just spray everything, right?
So we don’t want to use pesticides and when you do it yourself you can use natural controls,
pick off the bugs, use predatory bugs, and use some natural controls.
But see these things, while they do work, you have to be more diligent and be on top
of it and once again that would translate into more labor if you had a farm, and labor
is probably one of the biggest expenses of any farm.
These are their cucumbers and they’re letting their cucumbers sprawl out instead of trellising
up, and you know what?
They could afford to do this, and guess why?
Why is because they have so much space here and if I had this much space I wouldn’t
trellis my cucumbers up because guess what?
That takes more labor.
And I have labor, I could do it myself.
Oh man look at these cabbages, these cabbages are amazing.
So these are how cabbages grow, and what they normally do is they just pluck off the middle.
So here’s one they didn’t pluck off yet, it’s a cabbage, and let’s see when they
harvest it they just pluck it off and leave the outer leaves and that plant’s pretty
much not going to do anything else for the most part.
It might sprout some side shoots like this but it’s pretty much for them not really
financially viable anymore.
But for us at home, we could definitely eat all these leaves, and besides most people
think they can just eat this main cabbage ball, all these leaves are edible.
It tastes like a collard or a kale.
So after a hard day’s work, I get a treat.
And this is one of my favorite treats in the world, I’m eating a grass, or drinking a
grass.
And this is a great machine, it’s a sugar cane juicing machine and this is cool because
most sugar cane juicing machines aren’t clear.
And look at that, you can actually see the sugar cane literally just getting crushed
by those rollers, and this pulp coming out.
So it goes in this big sugar cane here, nice rich and juicy, and then it comes out this
dry pulp with all the juice extracted.
So that’s one of my favorite ways to eat sugar cane is juice.
Now this is a nice treat and you probably shouldn’t drink this every day because it
is really high in sugar after all, this is where we get sugar from, so this is the most
natural sugar that you could be eating.
It’s just fresh pressed from the sugar cane.
Look at that goes through a screen, comes out, you could buy this by the pint or by
the half gallon, and I’m getting half gallon today.