MY DEVISTATING SWEET CORN SHORTAGE ON LABOR DAY WEEKEND!

good morning folks and welcome back to wishwell Farms I'm Jason thanks for joining me along with my son Blake and my nephew Jake we have a skeleton crew today to get everything picked everybody has gone back to school or is off today so it's just us three getting everything picked it's probably just going to be sweet corn and then they got other things to do I'm going to be solo for part of the day so we're starting on this little block right here everything else in this field has been picked and mowed down and I just left this little section right here because it was underwater during one of those recent heavy rains that we had there's probably 10 or 20 dozen in there so we're getting that picked first then we're heading down in the valley over this hill there's a couple nice little patches down there and I'll show you the corn that I burned up with some herbicide a couple months ago which cost me big because we are hurting for corn and we have Labor Day weekend coming up this weekend as you can see right here there's no corn but there's corn planted see how it's all stunted and basically dead with no tassels or ears it's like that all the way a couple hundred yards that way this is where I burnt and killed about an acre and a half of sweet corn it's going to cost me dearly because it was my Labor Day corn about 2/3 of my Labor Day corn fortunately I have another nice patch over there all the way to the silos and over by the those tree lines that is not quite ready but it should be ready for uh Friday picking so what happened here the grass was so out of control down here I decided to try to control it with some uh post-emergent herbicides that you can spray over the top of corn and it doesn't hurt the corn however I must have forgotten that I'd already hit this section once and apparently I hit it twice and the sweet corn was not able to handle two applications of this post-emergent corn herbicide normally I don't have to spray anything like that but this section did get out of control so I was trying to salvage my crop and I ended up killing it nothing I can do about it now we're just trying to pick so this is what it should all look like this nice little block of corn right here it should look like that all the way back obviously this only got one application instead of two and it survived so we got this little block here hopefully we can get 10 or 20 dozen out of there maybe uh five or 10 dozen up here yeah there's not much oh boy hoping I can find some corn to buy for this weekend so we're sitting here contemplating on what to do I don't have enough corn this is all we got got it's about 35 dozen we're way short I need twice as much as this just to get me through tomorrow to send out my mobile market trailer so I I got a lead on some corn that I can get delivered on Friday but that doesn't help me out for Wednesday and Thursday tomorrow and Thursday today's Tuesday we're going to stop up at the new patch that I pointed out it's up by our Dairy Barn the by the trees in The Silo just to see how it looks I mean if we can get five or six more tubs you know another 20 30 dozen out there I might be okay for tomorrow but I'm might have to start searching around for some uh other local growers in my area that may have some extra speaked corn unfortunately all right I'm out here in our new patches supposed to be our Labor Day corn I call it I plan it on June 19th or 20th and going by past history's results that usually gets me perfect corn for Labor Day the weekend prior to labor day however Labor Day falls a little bit early this year it's on September 2nd I believe so that means Labor Day picking is going to be August 31st right September 1st whatever this variety must be a later variety it's not even close it's a week off and this corn right here it needs two or three more days and it would be nice to have a good rain on it I'll show you what it looks like I mean it's just barely there it's a little on the young side you know even I even see a little bit of blistery kernels up there at the top so we got to be really careful picking this stuff it's just not quite ready I think on a normal growing season it would be ready but we had unseasonably cool weather for like a week to 10 days and I think that set things back we had plenty of rain early on when this was getting the stablished but now we're almost in drought conditions and this corn could really benefit from a good rain to uh finish filling it out is what it is we're going to do our best we're just going to skim through here and see what we can find it's not looking good no driver today since it's just me and our skeleton crew I activated the uh GPS Auto steering oh I better hop back on activate Auto steering we just finished packing up corn how much do you think I got I was not hopeful that we even had 10 or 12 tubs but I'm pleasantly surprised that we got 16 exactly what I need to get through one day on the mobile market trailer at our satellite location so we survived for one more day but I'm in trouble for Friday and Saturday we're not even going to go into that patch until Friday I'm going to give it three full days to ripen so today's Tuesday so it ripen Wednesday and Thursday and today and then Friday morning we'll go in there and hopefully we can get 3 or 4 hundred dozen out of that patch which is still only half of what I need to get through the weekend uh I got a lead on possibly buying four bins melon bins full that's 200 dozen I can sell that at uh my Dublin location my pow location and of course on my trailer so whenever I get out of that patch I will first make sure I have enough for Worthington and then Clintonville the two they're certified farmers markets you're only allowed to sell what you grow you cannot bring in neighboring Farms or wholesale or any other kind of produce other than what you grow so I'll make sure those two markets are topped off with what they need first well and this one but that's if I can't find any to buy if I can't find any corn to buy I'll make sure this one is topped off first no matter what and then Worthington then Clintonville and then any other Boton corn I can find from neighboring Farms or from my uh my wholesale provider who buys corn up near Canton akan Cleveland area um if I can get some from him I can use that for the Powell or Dublin Farmers Market where I can sell neighboring Farms prce all right I'm going to roll that in the cooler and then I'm solo the rest of of the day I have tomatoes that I need to box up uh Emma and I picked well I should say she picked most of the tomatoes I helped her for about an half hour yesterday she hopefully has about 50 boxes worth piled up out on the plastic mulch I had her go through like we did last week and just pick the number one medium and large tomatoes and make piles on the plastic about every 10 ft I'm going to go out there by myself and start loading them up because I hate seeing those Tomatoes sit out in the heat all day today all day tomorrow I have my oldest son available tomorrow afternoon after 4: but it is just going to be miserably hot so I'm going to go get started on loading some of those Tomatoes up and getting them out of the field and getting them into my tomato cooler to chill down to 60° um I don't want to pick them when they're 85 90° and then put them in the cooler for two reasons one it's a lot of extra work for my air conditioner cooling unit on that cooler to bring down the tomatoes and I know they're going to stay hot for days and days you know where they're packed tight in the center takes a long time for the the cold air to penetrate into the center of that pallet and cool those Tomatoes down and there's a lot greater chance of them rotting and not holding for a through the weekend or even next week if I don't sell them all this weekend all righty so that's what's going on the rest of this morning picking and well picking done packing tomatoes and getting them up here and then I'm probably going to go out and do some solo green bean picking all right I'm out here in our tomato patch now it is getting hot it's a high of 91 there's a heat index warning here in Ohio today but it's stagnant and humid and just hot I know 91 is not that hot for the South and even for Ohio weather but late August on these Dog Days of August 91 is hot absolutely miserable so I'm going to try to get some of this work done before it gets any hotter it's probably only about 80 right now but it's climbing fast so as you can see we got piles of tomatoes about every other steak down the row all the way down there yes I know the tomato plants look like garbage they're full of blight and other things The Season's basically over for the field Tomatoes uh we'll get maybe one or two more little picks out of them and they'll be done fortunately I have another row that I'll be showing you here after I load up some of these that looks pretty good there is some blight moving in but about half the patch is beautiful and green and I kid you not some of the tomatoes are almost as big as soft balls like almost like grapefruit in between baseballs and softballs they are beautiful so hopefully those don't get any worse and we'll have a couple good picks out of there in the coming weeks before it really starts getting cold and the tomatoes will all kind of like start start dying off all right I'm going to get busy loading these up and get out of here before it gets any hotter this goes pretty fast since they're already picked all I got to do is throw them in the box that heat did a number on them yesterday I noticed some of them are starting to get a little on the soft side so hot yesterday and I'll probably just make piles of boxes down the row and then I'll come and pick them up later as you can see there are a lot of tomatoes out here but a lot of them are very small and part of the reason for that is the tomatoes got ahead of us this year after we transplanted and we didn't get the first stringing up in time and we also didn't get any bottom branches and suckers removed I like to remove three or four of the bottom branches when the plants are about oh I don't know 12 to 15 in tall after the first stringing we come through and we strip all the bottom branches and suckers off the bottom and that helps uh give us bigger Tomatoes something else I'm noticing because we left them out in the heat upside down they got almost sunburnt they're like getting squishy and soft so the ones that are sitting on top upside down it that was a bad idea we should have had them all facing stem up and I think it held up better now the ones that are in the other side of the row the plants shaded them they're fine it's the ones that were upside down on this side of the road the sun beating down on them yeah it's a squishy bad spot I can't use it so I have to uh get all of this done today they cannot sit out here in the heat another day or they will all be ruined and then all the work we put in yesterday picking these was for nothing got a long way to go um I got about 12 boxes done and there's at least 50 to 70 more out here so I'll be out here till at least lunchtime that's fine I'll survive oh there's a beauty something I was thinking about that I failed to mention when we were packing corn is about how much corn I need to get me through this weekend so for Friday on our trailer and for Saturday farmers markets I need about 700 dozen that would kind of max out every Market I could be I could get by with five or 600 but I would like to have 700 and at 8 to $9 a dozen one place I only charge $7 a dozen but a lot of people buy it by the ear or small increments of like three four or six ears so I average at least $9 a dozen so we're talking about5 to $6,000 of Revenue that I'm going to miss out on if I can't either find corn or have my own corn ready even if I had to find corn you know I'm going to make half that yes I'll be able to sell it and make a little bit of profit but uh I'm only going to make half of what I could make if it was my own corn so I'm kind of losing money two ways you know I have all the input costs involved with raising corn that I'm not going to recoup because the corn is not there I either killed it or it's not ripe but I'm just hopeful that we can find a couple hundred dozen at least to supplement what we have of our own hopefully that patch back there on the other side of the tree lines is going to be ready for Friday to pick and I'm hoping we can get three or 4 hundred dozen out there so everything from here on out is pure profit so I need to sell as much as I possibly can here in the final few weeks of good sales at farmers markets cuz it's going to really go downhill after Labor Day yeah this is a huge weekend for us to not have corn kind of stinks but like I said it is what it is we're going to do our best to harvest what we have and find some neighboring corn to supplement our own on man it is getting hot I was drenched in sweat out there I got one more row to pick up on the new row uh probably only 10 or 12 boxes so it's almost lunchtime I'm going to go get that done and then I'm going in to cool off woo man I'll be glad when this is done I'm out here on this final row I'm just throwing them in the boxes and then when I get back up to the barn I'll uh reorganize and situate them in the boxes so they're stackable but you can see these plants are nice and green for the most part there's definitely some blight moving in but the tomatoes are huge and healthy right now here's a quick look at them you can see we got a lot more size on them definitely some odd shapes but for the most part they're really nice and we were picking some a little bit on the light side but yeah these are these are beauties this is the way some of of them look out here look at that monster they're so huge I mean they're like in between baseballs and softballs wow that's a Whopper yeah really nice Tomatoes all right I just got back up in the barn and finished stacking everything on the pallet we ended up with 56 cases of tomatoes all packed by me solo fortunately I had help picking probably three4 of those by Emma yesterday morning before I went out and helped her finish we're glad those are up out of the field out of the heat roll them in a tomato cooler get those things chilled down to 60° and with the leftovers we have in there which is about 30 or 40 boxes we should be set for the weekend well it's about lunch time so I'm going to head on in and grab some lunch and I think I'm going to hold off on harvesting green beans until tomorrow cuz it's just so dang hot and I want to be able to pick these beans early in the morning when it's still pretty cool and just roll them in the cooler and pack them later when I have some help maybe tomorrow afternoon when my son gets home from college so I will see you guys bright and early tomorrow morning and we'll get back at it