We Didn’t Expect Our Grape Tomato Harvest To Take Off This Fast

Wow. This very well could be the best grape tomato crop I have ever grown. I can't wait to see how huge today's harvest might be. Just look at these things. They are absolutely loaded. My goodness. And they go all the way down, three rows worth. I am almost in disbelief at how amazing our grape tomatoes are this year. Welcome to Wishwell Farms, everyone. My name is Jason, I'm just piecing. I have four girls that will be here in a few minutes to start harvesting all these grape tomatoes. And today's harvest is going to be huge. After many, many days of clouds and rain and gloomy weather, I did not expect to see the grape tomatoes this loaded. But this is just what we need right now. We need to get loaded up on grape tomatoes so we can have some amazing sales at next week's Saturday Farmer's Markets. If you're wondering what these tomatoes are over here This is planting number five. in our greenhouses of six and these are determinate tomatoes. We have Red Deuce, BHN-589, and STM-2255, also known as the Hassanator. They're all looking really good. I'm really liking the compact size of these Red Deuce. Red Deuce are pretty nice in a greenhouse environment. We're already getting some nice fruit on these. A lot of them are in this stage, you know, quarter to silver dollar size. It looks like I definitely need to string up these two rows since they are stretchy a little bit more than the red deuce. I don't think I need to run another string trellis line on the red deuce yet, maybe sometime next week. But I'm definitely going to get these two done and the final stringing on our grape tomatoes. As you can see they are at the top of the PVC pipe extensions that we put on top of our t-posts. They're at about seven and a half feet high and I see that the plants are Stretching above that over in row two. So I'm going to be putting the final stringing on there today. But first, let's go take a look at our sixth and final greenhouse planting so you can see the different stages of growth. All right, this is our last and final greenhouse planting, planting number six. It's our little house because it's only 21 feet wide, but the standard 96 feet long. And each row is a different variety up here at the front. Roadster, Rambler, GTO. And STM 2255. And then each row has a different variety in the back quarter. But these are looking good as well. Finally starting to set some fruit. These are the tomatoes that we're going to be relying on to get us through a lot of July while we're waiting on our field tomatoes to ripen. See, a lot of them are just starting to set some small fruit, like dime to nickel size. So over here on the back quarter of each row, Red Snapper, Laguna Red. Maverick. Don't have high hopes for that one. I didn't really care for it too much last year. But we'll see how it does this year. And BHN-589, which is known to perform well in high tunnels and greenhouses for early season production. They're so thick you can pick handfuls. It's almost overwhelming. Tomatoes are in here. It's hard to know where to start picking. When we harvest our grape tomatoes, we use two hands, but I'm holding the camera with one hand, so that's why I'm only picking with one hand right now. On Mondays, we just always make sure Make sure we get the nice dark red ones out. On a Wednesday and Friday we would pick a shade lighter like that right there because we've got to get these nice red ones out of here today. Since we don't pick over the weekend on Saturday and Sunday they tend to get a little redder which I'm surprised with the amount of clouds we've had. But I guess when tomatoes are ready they're ready and they're just going to keep producing and producing. It's always nice when you can just pick handfuls of them. Kind of hard to do with one hand though. As you can see I'm removing the stems, the calyxes. Typically they come off on the plant. If you're careful how you pick them, they just pop right off and stay on the plant. But if they come off with the tomato, I mean you just barely brush them and they pop right off. Yes, it can become mundane picking grape tomatoes, but do you find any satisfaction in picking grape tomatoes? And then looking at them after and not seeing all the red again? Yeah, for sure. These little picking totes fill up pretty quick. Sometimes we'll just push the wheelbarrow down the road with a crate in it and just pick right into the wheelbarrow. You can do it either way because we're probably going to fill our little totes up about every five to ten minutes. But it is very convenient having it right there at waist height and be able to just drop the tomatoes right in. You don't have to bend over at all. The only time we got to bend over a little bit is to get the ones that maybe are growing low down here by our knees because maybe some of the leaders, suckers, branches kind of fell down out of the So you can see there's some tomatoes down there about two feet off the ground, but a majority of them I would say are up here at waist to chest height, maybe even head height. All right, I'm going to get started on this trellising. This is the Florida weave. I'm just going to do these two rows because they're getting tall, and then I'll jump over and do these grapes and get that final string up, up and over the post. All right, just finishing up the final row of running the Florida weave on these determinate. Greenhouse tomatoes. These aren't greenhouse tomatoes. They're just grown in a greenhouse. Hopefully that makes sense. These are the same varieties that we grow in our fields. So it's going to be really interesting to see how they perform in here compared to the ones that are grown outside in the soil on raised beds. But I've been using this Florida Weave trellising system for 25 years. It's what all commercial growers use. It's the quickest, easiest way to string up these tomatoes to keep them from flopping over on the ground. Keeps everything nice and neat and clean This is Emma's third year harvesting grape tomatoes, and she said this might be the heaviest grape tomato harvest she's ever seen. Between that post and this post, right here, she filled an entire tub full, a picking tub full. Yeah, it is just absolutely loaded out here. So the way we typically harvest these is one person will have an entire side to themselves. There's three rows in here, but we have four people picking. So someone is picking on the other side of the row. But when we get to the end, Emma will turn around and come back on the other side of this row because sometimes there's tomatoes you can't reach through the plant without damaging it or knocking off green tomatoes. So we pick on both sides of these grape tomatoes. All right, I need some guesses on how many pints we're going to pick today. Everyone throw out a number. Over 150, under 350. What are we going to get? Emma said 225. Anybody else want to guess? Ooh, someone thinks we're going to get 350. That's right up there with a record harvest. We will see. Once we get a full tub, we just roll them up in the barn in the wheelbarrow. Now, if we were going to be picking 15 or 20 tubs like this, I would back a truck up just to make it more efficient. So I'll take the tub of grape tomatoes out, put it in the barn, bring down another empty one there and that one, and that should hold most of them for today. So we'll just fill this entire table up with the grape tomatoes. Probably get them packed and out of the way because we're going to be filling all these tables up with red round beefsteak tomatoes next. I think we're going to have 65 to 100 boxes of red round beefsteak tomatoes to pick next. It's a good day. One bad thing about a Monday morning after a rainy Saturday is having to put away all the wet tablecloths that have dried. So most of them are spread out in the box trucks on top of the tents. But sometimes there's not room, especially in Joel's truck that goes to Dublin because it's so full of all his maple syrup and freeze-dried candy and things he sells for his business, that there's not room to spread the tents out. So on three of the trucks we have the tent spread out inside the trucks and the tablecloths are then draped over the top of the tents. But it's still a pain, even though they're not out here laying around the barn drying, I still have to go. Fold up all the tablecloths, put them away, fold up the tents, bungee cord them to the truck wall so they're ready to go this Friday in preparation for this Saturday's farmer's markets. It usually happens maybe three or four, maybe five times a season, so it's usually not that often, but this is definitely not a good sign starting off our season with a rainy Saturday. Hopefully it doesn't become a trend. All right, got the Worthington tablecloths folded. And still need to put Joel's tents back in the Dublin truck. It's not like it takes that long. It's just one little extra thing that I have to do after a rainy Saturday that puts me behind on other important tasks happening on the farm. I see that my son Blake just arrived to try to get that pesky groundhog that's running around down here. I definitely don't want that thing loose on the farm all summer, destroying our vegetables. Let's take a look and see what we're going to be harvesting in here today in greenhouse number one. Wow, look at that. Another great harvest happening this morning. Gee me, Christmas. They're definitely in full production now. Every row is absolutely loaded. I'm guessing we're going to get 800 to 1,000 pounds out of that greenhouse today. Let's check on our little baby robins up here. One of them finally flew out of the nest today. Oh, there goes another one. Find the coop. I might try to put them back up there. But I've been checking on them periodically. Oh, I think they've all flown out. No, there's another one up there. But I've been looking at them. Every day for the last few days, just trying to get them used to seeing me. The mom and dad robins are not happy. Hopefully this little guy knows what he's doing. Can't fly yet. I don't know if our barn cat likes robins or not. Hopefully not. All right, let's check and see how the grape tomato harvest is coming. Looks like we got two more full ones. Three more full ones. We got three more full tubs out there right now. And how do you think it's been going since I was gone? Okay. Are we almost done or do you still have a ways to go? Okay. Point over the other ones. Okay. All right. They're getting close to being done. Just wrapping up a final row or two on the opposite sides of where they started. So it shouldn't be too much longer. So typically on three rows of grape tomatoes, which is half of this greenhouse, we get about 3,500 to 4,000 pints in a season. We could potentially get much more, but we terminate our harvest in here by mid-July. And I know some of you are thinking right now, why in the world would you stop harvesting grape tomatoes in mid-July, in the middle of the summer? Several reasons. One, the demand for them drops dramatically, like 75%. Because by mid to late July, there's many, many other farmers at the farmer's markets that also have their grapes and cherries at their farm stands that they either grew in high tunnels, unheated high tunnels, or out in their open fields. In addition to that, Home gardeners, or just people that maybe have a front porch with a cherry or grape tomato growing on it, are harvesting their own tomatoes. So the demand for our early season tomatoes drops off so hard that it's not worth continuing to pick just to reduce our price by two-thirds to be able to move them. We want to get a premium price for these for however many weeks that is, mid-May through mid to late July. Furthermore, Usually by late July, mid to late July, these plants are looking rough. They've kind of run their course. They've been picked very, very heavily for many, many weeks. And we start seeing lots of thrips and spider mites and other things that I just can't get under control. And that's when I'm very, very busy out in our fields harvesting all of our other crops. Zucchini, squash, cucumbers, peppers, eggplant, sweet corn. That's when cantaloupes start up. It's just a very busy time to have to worry about keeping these grape tomatoes going when there's just not much demand left for them or much money left in making off these grape tomatoes. So I was just looking through this tub and I found these. This is one reason that we don't want to miss the red ripe ones deep inside the plants. Sometimes they will split on us. I'm not sure what's going on with this one, but you know, every now and then we will find a split tomato. Fortunately, it's a rare occurrence right now. It'll definitely be interesting to see how many pints we get today. So Emma thinks we're going to get 225. I'm pretty sure it's going to be every bit of that. One of the girls said 350. We won't get to 350. That would almost be a record pick all time, back when we used to have four rows of grape tomatoes. That entire greenhouse used to be all grape tomatoes. I would plant two different plantings. But that was before I realized how much the demand dropped for them in late July. So I don't want to be messing with grape tomatoes come August. They will be done. We'll be concentrating on our red round tomatoes in the greenhouses for a few extra weeks and into the second or third week of August. And then we'll be entirely focused on our outdoor crops. Maybe we don't have as many as I thought. We got three up here now and they're going to be bringing up one more. Two more. Oh yeah, maybe two more. It's nice to do this job on the round table. That way, when you spill the grape tomatoes, they kind of just stay on the table and don't fall on the floor. I'll go get a pallet here in a second. Riley and Bree are filling the pint flats, or the flats with pints, I should say. We like to use the clear plastic pints so the customers can see all of the red. Just visually more appealing at the farmer's markets. Now for strawberries, we used to use the pulp, the green pulp quarts, and I still have a whole skid of them up there from when I grew strawberries. Anybody want to buy them? But for displaying our grape tomatoes and our red round tomatoes at farmer's markets, we like the clear plastic just because of the visual eye appeal that really stands out on the tables. This is going to be one of those days where we need half a pallet just for grape tomatoes. All right, there's today's harvest, and everybody overestimated, including myself. 191 pints, and I think what happened is the far south row gets the most sun because the determinants are on the other side of it, so it has more sun exposure. So the heaviest harvest came from those rows and that's where I was doing the filming and talking about our harvest earlier. So if the other two rows were as heavy as that first one, we would have been about 250, I'm guessing. But 191 pints of grape tomatoes is not a bad harvest. It's about 150 pounds and we sell those for $7 a pint. So there's about $1,300 there. Not too shabby for about an hour and a half of work. All right, into the tomato cooler. 61 degrees in here. Perfect temperature for storing tomatoes. And a dehumidifier keeps the humidity down in the 50s. 50% humidity. What is this? What? I can't believe it. A blue sky. I forgot what that looked like. Beautiful. The sun finally made an appearance. All right, let's go check out the harvest action in greenhouse number one. Today is actually the first good harvest of big Dina. Some of these things are whoppers. Whoa. This is why we prune our tomatoes down to either three or four. It just gives us tremendous size. See how a lot of our clusters are three? Here's a four, still a nice size. But if we left five or six or seven tomatoes on all these clusters, we wouldn't have any of those massive sandwich-sized slicers. So, That is one of the main reasons we prune them down to either three or four. The other reason is because it can overwhelm the plant. When it starts carrying too many tomatoes it'll start shutting down and it'll give us blanks at the top. It'll stop producing until we harvest a lot of tomatoes and then it'll come back. So we're trying to keep that balance of vegetative growth and reproductive growth on the plant. You can see how huge those tomatoes are. Well this one's kind of a medium size but man that's a whopper right there. Beautiful. This row hasn't been harvested yet. Quite a few in here. You can see some of the green ones on the floor. Sometimes those just fall off on their own. Sometimes they fall off when we bump the plants when we're working on them. Or the wheelbarrows might bump the edges of the tomatoes and knock some on the ground, but we can still sell those. We'll pick those up and folks at the farmer's markets who want green tomatoes to make fried green tomatoes, we'll gobble those up. Check out those beauties. Wow. We'll go ahead and take that one. That one will be ready during our next pick in two days. I'm up here in greenhouse number two now, our second planting and our third planting. Our second planting is indeterminate, our third planting is determinate, and this is our trial planting. There's five varieties in each row. They're looking pretty good. I mean, they're absolutely loaded with tomatoes. It'll be very interesting to see how they do. Looking forward to starting harvest on all of these trial tomatoes. I'm pretty happy with the size so far. I mean, they look pretty normal. I wanted to show you some of the size on these clusters. These are unbelievable. This is Big Dina, a cluster of four there. We left a lot of fours in here, some threes. I mean, just look at the size. The plants, I'm almost surprised the plants can hold these things up without them ripping off. They're so huge. And a few of them starting to turn. I mean, you can't get a prettier cluster of green tomatoes than that. That is gorgeous. I am so happy with what I'm seeing in The harvest is going to be amazing here in another week or two. Big Dina is big. I forgot to mention that today was Memorial Day, so I hope you all had a great Memorial Day weekend. So we're just going to have a short day of work today. As soon as the girls finish picking tomatoes and getting them packed, I'm going to let them go home. It'll probably still be nearly noon before we're done, but there won't be any afternoon work. Right now, while they're finishing up picking tomatoes, I'm going to back up our satellite produce trailer and Get it opened up and start getting it ready for this Saturday sales from that trailer. So we'll be doing it for farmers markets and our satellite trailer this Saturday. I'm just going to start getting this thing cleaned up. First, I'll remove all the old price cards, power wash it, and then touch up the paint and that all of the gas shocks are in working order. And all of the straps, the little buckle straps that hold the wings closed are all working well. Make sure there's no rips in our banners. Go through the tote. Make sure there's paper towels, wet wipes, credit card paper, scissors, extra price cards. Just everything they need to run a market. Bags, two different sizes of bags. We have these rolled t-shirt pull-and-pack bags. So I'll put an extra box of those bags underneath, some larger sweet corn bags, and down here I'll put our sweet and hot pepper relish. It typically only takes me a couple hours to have this thing ready to go, but I don't want to be messing with this on Thursday and Friday. So I'll probably finish getting it ready tomorrow and then pull it out of the way and I'll put a wholesale produce order in Wednesday for a Friday delivery. So that way I can have some southern watermelons and cantaloupes, maybe a little bit of sweet corn, you know, coming out of Georgia and Florida. And onions, Vidalia onions, baby red potatoes, some zucchini, cucumbers, bell peppers, yellow squash. And then hopefully I can find some local strawberries from some Amish farms just up the road since I don't grow strawberries anymore. And then of course we'll be loaded down with our homegrown tomatoes. All right, we just finished tomato harvest. It looks like they brought up about 18 tubfuls. They look really nice. Good size, good color. Good quality. This should be pretty close to 800 pounds. Well, I was off just a little bit. We ended up only getting 65 boxes, so 650 pounds, which is pretty typical for greenhouse number one that has 615 plants in it, plus about 20 pounds of secondhand tomatoes. There's today's grapes. So as you can see, we're starting to get a decent looking load of tomatoes here in the storage room. So everything that's in here now and it was harvested today, could potentially be sold this coming Saturday. But if we end up having too much of something, what was picked today could hold until next week's farmers market. That is what's great about having a tomato storage room with low humidity kept in the low 60s Fahrenheit. You can store tomatoes for quite some time. They're not perishable like other vegetables and fruits coming out of the fields. Tomatoes will continue to ripen and Get a deeper red color and have more flavor and more juice and be better by keeping them here in this tomato storage room for over a week. So it works out great for us. And I know that if I do have a bad day, I can hold them over until the next week and they will be just fine.