My First Time Harvesting Spinach

Good morning, everybody. How you doing today? My name's Andrew. I'm Daniel. I'm Papa. I'm Eddie. I'm Calvin. I'm Whitney. 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. This is the hole, like the hole inside is spinning. Oh, really? Yeah. I see that. Wow. It's like floating. 60 degrees. Hey, everybody. Welcome back. It's so nice to have you. Just got finished with a quick walk through some of the greenhouses. We had an issue with one of the pots in greenhouse number four that we had to fix. Someone, probably me, forgot to punch out the drain holes in the bottom, but now it's all set up and ready to go. The greenhouses are looking really good. We do have a big job this morning. We need to get out to the garden and do some harvesting, but before I can do that, I need to get my chickens taken care of. First basket of eggs has now been collected. Chickens have been fed and eggs have now been collected. That sure does look like some comfy cattle there. Don't get up on my account. You guys stay relaxing. Now that the chickens are all taken care of, we're going to make our way up into the farm market, make sure that they don't need any help. Dad just got back from the wholesaler. I think Grammy's working on some stuff in the kitchen we'll have to check on. But once we can make sure that nobody needs any help, we can head out to the fields and get pickin'. What are you working on? I am making jam. Strawberry jam. Strawberry and strawberry rhubarb. Ooh! We're going to get to pickin' in one second. We just got to check temperatures in this greenhouse and make sure that everything has plenty of water. 60 degrees in here. A little cooler than we'd like it to be in the germination greenhouse, but that'll change. It's going to warm up throughout the day and this greenhouse will do the same. It looks good out here in the garden. We've got a few different things planted. We have our spring onions, we have our spinach, and then we also have a few varieties of lettuce out here in the field. They're a little on the smaller side, but they're out here. Something to keep in mind though, what we see over here that's grown up really nice is not the only stuff that's out here. You can see right here, we have got some smaller stuff poking out of the soil. This is spinach. Yeah, this would be our second planting of spinach on the year. In the next few days, we're going to have some really hot temperatures and I am worried about some of this smaller spinach. I hope it's going to be able to survive it. Thankfully, we've had enough moisture that I'm hoping it'll just be a nice boost for its growth cycle, but spinach doesn't like it when it gets randomly hot. And the other thing out here I wanted to show you, right here a little smaller, we have some red beets. So we've got a row right here, and if we move a little bit further down, we've got some red beets coming out of the soil here. And then we've got some more red beets right here. It's one of those things that gets me really excited. We raise a lot of red beets. The fact that they're already starting to pop out of the soil, it's making me happy. But the real reason why I'm out here is actually for spinach. So what we're going to do now is work on getting this harvested. Now, some of you may be curious as to why you haven't seen me harvest spinach yet this year. And the number one answer I can give you is Grammy. Grammy absolutely loves her garden. She's got a few different things out here that she's been harvesting. The number one thing I would say has been the spring onions. Even though we planted them and that was kind of Matthew's thing, Grammy really likes coming out to pick in the garden. I think she finds it relaxing. She's not able to get out to the fields and do the picking. So we let her do as much picking as she wants in the garden. And the main thing she's been focusing on has been spinach and spring onions. So because of that, I haven't been able to harvest just yet. So this is actually my first time picking spinach on the year. And I'm pretty excited about it. One thing I will say, the spinach looks beautiful. As we get further down the row, we get out of all this grass, but it doesn't seem to bother it too much. Thankfully, the spinach was well-established and the way I'm picking it is going to keep it so that the spinach continues to grow. The only real complaint I have about harvesting spinach today is the fact that it is cold outside. Our temperatures are in the low 40s and you can definitely feel it. I didn't bring gloves because I didn't expect to be picking spinach today, but I'm happy that the spinach looks really nice. Really, really nice. And I won't complain about the cold too much. I'm excited to be picking something. As I'm picking these spinach leaves, I want to give you guys some tips so that you, when you're harvesting your own spinach, or if you're deciding on picking spinach, you can have a little bit more information. So first, as you're picking your spinach, you want to make sure you're taking the outer leaves, keeping that center plant alive because that is going to continue growth and it's going to encourage growth. As we remove these outer leaves, the center of the plant is going to stay nice and healthy and you're going to have more spinach to harvest. Another thing you can do is keep an eye on the weather because if it's going to be getting hot, you want to make sure that you get your spinach harvested in the morning because that will help keep the leaves nice and tender. Perhaps if you live in the South where it gets quite a bit warmer, that is definitely a tip you're going to have to keep track of. Now, I'm picking here in the morning because it is the coolest. That means our spinach is going to stay nice and tender. If we waited to the later part of the day, this could get pretty droopy and it would not hold as nice for us. Now, perhaps you live in an area where it just is a little bit warmer and there's nothing you can do about it. Putting the spinach after you harvest in an ice bath is super important because what happens is when the spinach starts to get warm, it loses moisture in the leaves and that's why it begins to wilt. However, because we're harvesting in the morning, we haven't let our spinach have the opportunity to lose moisture. But if you live somewhere where it's a little bit warmer, unlike where I'm at today, that's a little tip that you can use to keep the spinach nice and fresh and make sure it's nice and crisp. So the most important thing I would say to you if you want to extend your harvest is just keep that center of the spinach growing as long as possible. Try and pick earlier in the morning. And another thing, which a lot of people don't think I do, is don't be too rough with your crop. Plants, they do get stressed out. Unlike me, I don't get stressed out. But when your plant gets stressed out, that can actually slow down the growth. So by being a little bit more gentle when you're harvesting, it actually encourages the plant to put on more growth. By keeping that center alive and by not being too rough with it, you're gonna be able to ensure that your spinach harvest lasts a lot longer than it would if you were being rough with the plant. Before I came out here, I had a conversation with Grammy as to where she's been picking. She said she's been working her way up through the field and told me to start at the top. She said if I need a little bit more to fill my basket, we can go back down to the beginning of the row. Hopefully we can find some more. Well, that should about do it. We were able to get an entire basket full of spinach. The next job is gonna be taking this back to the farm and getting it all cleaned up. The spinach can get pretty dirty. What we like to do is go through the rows with a cultivator and try and rip up as many weeds as possible. It keeps the row looking nice and clean and it just encourages plant growth. So the number one important thing to us is plant growth. But because of that, the spinach does get a little yucky. So I gotta take it back to the farm, give it a good rinse, and then it'll be ready to sell. Before I head back to the farm though, I wanna look at this lettuce and see how it's growing. It's that toy car. I'll keep that. Here's some of our Simpson leaf lettuce. It's got new growth coming towards the center. This stuff was transplanted pretty small. The weather hasn't been the most favorable, but it's looking nice and moving up from the Simpson lettuce right here into some red lettuce, another red leaf. And up here at the top, we have another form of leaf lettuce. This is just a green leaf and it's growing really well. A lot of growth towards the center, which for us is a good sign. And we technically don't need to pick any of these, but onions, beautiful, beautiful onions. Now growing this stuff is obviously fun for us, but it is also a livelihood. So if you guys would appreciate any tips on growing spinach, lettuce, onions, let me know down in the comments and I'll try and fill you in. Now, just because we do this for a living doesn't mean we know everything when it comes to growing food. So if you have any tips or tricks, whether it's spinach, onions, red beets, whatever it is, let me know down in the comments. I appreciate it. Let me know what you think, Grammy. Just forget the onion. I just picked that because I wanted to. Nice. Beautiful stuff, huh? Yeah, a lot of the stuff, it's a little smaller. Yeah. I guess because you've been picking it. I just took the big leaves. You're a hard picker. You need to be nicer on the crops. Once we got finished with washing the spinach, I was asking what job needed to be done next and dad said, do you mind grading eggs? And I was like, sure, why not? It's not like I grade eggs every single day. Just feels like it. I just got a bulk of the eggs graded. The eggs I collected today, I haven't graded yet, but we've got two full boxes here, which is a good thing because eggs have been in high demand. We've had a lot of people showing up looking for them and the fact that they're picking them up makes me very happy. I'm now making my way from greenhouse to greenhouse, finding any spot that's a little on the drier side and giving it a quick drink. I don't think we're going to have to do much watering today. It's going to be cloudy all day, but I know this upcoming week, it's going to be bad when it comes to watering. The restaurant's showing up, so now, just got the last of our potatoes that were in the hopper ran through the washer. We have two more bins of potatoes from last year's harvest that yet have to be washed and bagged. It's amazing that they lasted as long as they have. They are starting to have a little bit of trouble keeping, but that's to be expected. I mean, we're almost into June and we still have potatoes. It's so hard to drive into a pallet when all of the ground is uneven, but Daniel, he does a pretty good job. We're getting ready to head up for lunch, but I was talking to Matthew this afternoon. My main job is just going to be helping customers out. Lots and lots of customers. Just got in for lunch. We are having BLTs today. We've got more and more people showing up here at the farm market. I've probably made a hundred trips up and down this hill grabbing stuff. I'm very thankful for my older brother, Matthew. He usually handles all the customers. It's a lot of work. All this talking to people, it's a lot. That tractor looks really funny without a hood on it. It had a little bit of damage, so we had to replace one of the radiators and we have to replace the hood. But right now, it's just running around without a hood on. Those are my favorite. What are you guys doing over here? Go graze. Go have a nice time. I just made it home after a long day of work. And look, we've got babies at the dinner table getting some dinner. How was your day, Callie? Good. Good? How was your day, Ronnie? Good. Oh, okay. And how was your day, Lily? Good. All right. Well, now that I am home, we are going to get ourselves some dinner. We had a really good day. I am tired, but that means this is where we're going to end the video. I'd like to thank everyone for watching and I will see you next time. Buh-bye!