Nothing but respect and admiration for what you do. I’m in a. Bigger city central Wyo, I had a market garden farmers market set up for 8 yrs until downtown coalition and the city tanked my market. I’ve scaled back to large garden and growing for winter storage because of the state of our food system and the prices. I also grow out rare varieties and list in seed savers exchange based in Iowa. I did all my work my self with very occasional help from a nephew, I know what it takes to pull this off. Excellent video keeping it very real.
I'm building a permaculture market garden bit by bit. Every time I get a cheque I buy something, seeds, irrigation pipe, drippers, chicken wire, fences, trees. An upcoming project is a greenhouse, but I'm building a fenced outdoor garden at the moment. Irrigation is a MUST!!! Nothing else happens without the Irrigation! Living in Zone 9B helps, I can grow something all year round. It's hard work. I have a horse, sheep and chickens that provide manure and that's my fertiliser. That DEFINITELY helps!!! It can be done, but you need to be creative. Permaculture stacking helps. Syntropic Agroforestry helps. Owning your own land and living off-grid lowers your overheads and means you can pump more money into your farm! Grow some annuals for quick cashflow, but put in perennial crops, for the future. Learn to propagate your own perennial crop plants. I am a Multi-Generational Smallholder, BTW. My place is not making a profit yet, but one day it will. I hope all this info helps. God Bless!
Thanks! This is different than permaculture built more as a six figure business long term but I'm gonna goof around with permaculture for me eventually.
@@farmtablewest5991 Hi just wanted to say that from watching this one video I couldn't tell what you're doing exactly other than growing veg. You didn't mention if you're organic cert. or no-till-no-dig or regenerative ag. which encompasses many things. If you're regenerative, then the goal would be to continually grow the quality of the soil through different inputs, along with keeping something growing at all times if possible. I imagine you get bad winters there so I don't know what's possible to grow over the winter in open fields. Whatever it is has to be terminated and then planted into and the dead cover crop becomes the mulch for the field, but of course that doesn't go so well with those paper pot planters I've seen a LOT of video from some really good regenerative farmers, and they're not very keen on permaculture, because the very thing you're doing, which is high-density, high profit crop farming, it doesn't lend itself well to permaculture. This doesn't change the fact that having hedge rows with different perennial food items or flowers to help bring in the pollinators can't be put into place because I see that often in the type of farming you're doing, but they're on the boundaries of a field with maybe one hedge row passing through the center of the field. As you said farming is tough and it takes time and other than incorporating hedge rows around the boundaries and even planting trees if you have the land to grow you're own wood for harvesting to make wood mulch, the main thing I think I'd focus on is building the quality of those outside beds through continual inputs and that will eventually fix the issue with the clay soil. No-Till Growers and Richard Perkins have both been very informative for me but I still have about 3 years before I start and for now I'm just raised bed gardening. Really good video. As a side note in the right environments permaculture CAN be highly profitable, but I personally think it's better employed in subtropical or tropical environments which is what I'll be doing
@@johndoh5182 im only growing veg and making content like this. I agree with all you said about permaculture. Love Richard Perkins and No Till Growers.
I can already tell you. It's a hella lotta work. I did an organic farm internship in 1997. Gal was from a rich family. I wasn't. At the end of summer I moved off the island and started a housecleaning business and was fully booked in 2 months. Why? Cleaning houses was easier and I'm not from a rich family. Yes, vegetables take a hella lot of water. More than you think. People have no idea. Dragging 100-foot hoses isn't fun.
When a person says "organic", I think of a certain thing, and that is meeting the requirements of whatever state they are in to receive that certification. When I hear terms like "no-till", "no-dig", "regenerative agriculture", "permaculture", those have very different meanings, and trying to achieve "organic" without using these other methods is INCREDIBLY hard. You seem to want to point to a fallacy, which is you have to come from a wealthy family to have success in this but I watch many channels that not only cover what they've gone through but cover other farms and people are often coming from a position of very little, starting with nothing more than a loan, or they don't own land and rent it, or many other situations. The first thing to understand if you want to do this particular type of farming is regenerative agriculture, because those very methods is pretty encompassing and implies minimal soil disturbance and organic. The next thing to know is how to run a business. And while I list "how to run a business" as second, the very people that get shown in videos often list that as no. 1. There are people that make good money farming 1/4 acre. But, they have access to the organic materials they need to keep building up their soil quality which is the main input for regenerative ag. depending on soil quality. If you already excellent soil then planting a winter cover crop that can be terminated in the Spring starts to become all you need although every few years they still tend to need a good dumping of compost into their beds. Regenerative ag. tends to cut down on the amount of water you need BTW, except for those crops that require a lot of water like celery. Good channel, No-Till Growers. If you have a yard, grow food using those techniques and you might figure out how to scale up again and maybe understand something you didn't before. I've seen farms where they use nothing but rain-water. They capture rain water and store it. Didn't need a $10,000 well.
Appreciate the brutal honesty. Thank you. I haven't taken the plunge you have, still testing the waters and slowly building up skills and infrastructure. Good to know what it really takes to get things truly profitable. Also good to hear a recommendation about Neversink Farm's course. I really admire that farm, I can't afford the course right now, but it does appear to be well worth it. Something I'll have to be patient about. There's a lot of patience needed in the farming game as well.
I’m in Cody almost every week because I do produce deliveries. Good to see fresh produce being grown in that area. I would recommend checking with the health food stores in that area, Thermopolis, Riverton, Worland.
I work for Spokane Produce, so quite a bit of stuff. But I know at least 3 ladies I can maybe put you in contact with, who own health food stores who are always looking for fresh reliable organic produce. The produce that we ship doesn’t always make it in top condition when it’s Organic, it has it’s great moments depending where it’s coming from but nothing beats local. I live in WA and am planning on starting a market garden, hopefully by next spring, so I’m happy that you’re making progress!
So many people romanticize it and make it look so easy, well I work on three different produce farms in my area and it’s the furthest thing from easy. Nothing is easy about picking cherry Tom’s in a 95° high tunnel in the middle of July. lol Great video! Gained a new follower. 👍🏼
@@farmtablewest5991 don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing I’d rather be spending my time/energy/lifeforce doing. I love it. But it ain’t for the faint of heart. Keeping it real. I like it.
Reality is not negative. Thanks for sharing your reality. Ive recently been bitten hard by the gardening bug and am in the very early stages of creating an income. I'm lucky in that I'm in zone 7 with a substantial southern facing slope I plan to take advantage of with the addition of green houses down the road but will start with simple row covers just to see how long I can extend a season and how early I can start the next. I definitely plan to get a small tractor to do most if not all of the hard work but that will be a mission unto itself! Good luck to you and I'm sure a larger metro area will pan out and bring good $$$
if you have the space to dedicate to large mound of wood chips for a few years, you will be able to improve your soil considerably. i did all that before i planted my little orchard / food forest because of the weeds and horrible soil i had. i do not need to water as much since i have 2' of aged wood chips over all of my orchard. i do not have to weed because i killed them all with fresh wood chips in the beginning. now all i have to do is to continually improve fertility which i have done. every year i get better yield with less work. i started in the 80's and the soil conversion took me longer because i am not rich! it took me 10yrs of easy work since most of the work was done by my loader. but all that time completely changed my soil. after the 3rd year i planted cover crops and added fertility. then i started planting. you can do the same thing one section at a time. if you do it right, chips become excellent compost in 3yrs. it is ideal if you have chickens as they will scratch, eat bugs, and poop all over your mound. in fact they will probably not leave your mound! that saves you on feed too. then you can use the aged chips on your beds as the years go by. i make mounds for beds with them. harvesting is also much easier. i just harvested garlic all as big as the largest apples you have seen. i just stuck my hand in and pulled them out. no shovel needed. that is how fluffy my soil is now. and full of life. and it holds nutrients and water. you just need a large enough space for the chip truck to dump at least 10 truck loads. the mounds will be half the height after the 1st yr. and 2/3 after the 2nd. rake off the top chunky chips and below will be black gold!
Nice! I can't really do that with the system I use to produce. But I do add 1 inch of compost at least per year and weeds are les and less of a problem every year.
@@farmtablewest5991 yeah, situations make all the difference. you can do things well. you can do thing quickly. you can do things cheaply. choose any two! i had to do things well since that is just who i am. i had to do things cheaply since i am poor. so i had to do it slowly. thankfully i started when i was young as you have. it will get easier. i wish you all the best. we need to move away from the failing industrial corporate farming that is ruining everything.
I plan on doing a permaculture forest on my parents land with a similar method. They have 30 acres and we’re going to gather all the fallen wood and clear small trees and brush and chip it all, then make up a bunch of Johnson-Su Bioreactors with the chips and fall leaves. By the next fall it will have broken down into black gold, just like if you pile it in mounds, just faster. Then next fall we’ll spread it thick in our first orchard section and plant out our orchard trees and bushes and start the process all over, adding a section each year. Going to be enlarging the existing pond and hooking up a solar pump to an existing well, then run main lines to the orchard and set up drip. At the same time, close to the house we’ll be putting in an in ground market garden setup using mini beds (look up herrick kimball mini beds) for all the annual produce. I’ve been trialing in ground gardening with tomatoes in woven ground cover and they have been doing amazing. In fact way better than I expected and no irrigation needed so far even with 6 weeks of high temps and no rain (SE Oklahoma 7b).
@@RustyBobbins yup. except that you are going with a lot less thickness than i did. my entire orchard is under 2' of chips and the raised bed mounds are another 2' on top of that. this is why i have no weeds at all. the animal tracked and wind blown weeds are easily picked off during my daily activity and at most takes 30min/day. you would need more than all the plants in your 30 acres to cover an acre of land with aged chips this high. it would also damage the rest of the eco system. it is quite astonishing how much volume is lost through the process. over the years i built up this pile, there have been close to a thousand truckloads of chips delivered from 5 arborist companies. even with the reactors, i would doubt you could build that thick a layer in one year but it certainly will shorten your time. on the other hand, you will get going faster even with a thinner layer and can build it up over the years. what i did was to go full depth in one section and use it while i built up another section the following year. i had some serious weed problems like bindweed and japanese knotweed. 30 acres would be awesome. i would have all sorts of wildlife areas and ponds all over. you will do just fine. it is a lot of work though. pace yourself. you don't want to hurt yourself. i hurt myself plenty when i was young and all of them come back and haunt you when you get old. it is a marathon. develop a pace and keep at it. in time you can make awesome things happen. generating food is smart. if the covid taught us one thing, it is that the supply system is very fragile. the less you depend on the rest of the world, the more resilient you will be. good to see young people getting back to the land. you give me hope for the future of this land 🙂 btw, the easiest way to grow both potatoes and tomatoes is in a mound with nothing else to buy. as the plant gets taller, you increase the height of the mound. you will have more root to support more tomatoes and you will have layers of potatoes. i do not use plastic in most cases. really the only time is for poly-carbonate for my greenhouses and pond liners. i stay away from fads that want to sell me stuff. i use nature as a guide and ally. i do not even buy organic fertilizer. i have lived on less than $10/yr for the past 20+yrs. stay close to nature and be well 🙂
Soil works GSR what his channel a good soil test and figuring if you need potassium or calcium or etc you can loosen your soil but when you mix clay and sand that is the recipe for cement
It's hard to explain in a short video. I'm still reinvesting a lot into the farm for another 2-3 years so soon I'll pay myself about $2400/month but it'll go up a lot more once the farm is fully invested.
I put sand in my clay base garden and when I stopped farming I opened it to the horses and they don’t make a dent but around where I didn’t put sand is softer
Starting small while still working off site helps. Reinvest any farm income is key. Know your area market & preplan for future end goal (build up with reinvesting).
Thank you for uploading this valuable video with very realistic and accurate information. One question, is it not easier to grow only 3 or 4 types of produce without spreading yourself too thin? For example, tomatoes, celery, sparragus and salanova? That way, you can concentrate the effort to grow very good yields instead of trying to grow a bunch of things that are not profitable. Please let me know. Your insight is really appreciated.
I used to think that but the problem is it's difficult to sell huge volumes of one thing unless your selling to a big wholesaler or have a market like Chicago. This style is much more versatile in smaller markets and everything I grow is very profitable.
Yes, you are correct that focusing on around six crops is going to be more profitable in the long run. I used to farm like the young man in this video, and while the money is extremely good (he is not lying) the amount of work it requires does not justify the profit, in my opinion. I think this guy is still in the honey moon phase of market gardening, where the money is good and you neglect the amount of work you are putting in to make said money. I used to grow 20 crops and now I grow around 8 and I make just as much money as I did before while halving my workload. In my area no one grows broccoli/cauliflower, so I have completely cornered that market. You want to focus your time on growing difficult to grow crops that have little to no processing time. Carrots are another good one.
@GreenFoxGardens1985 so I am definitely in the honeymoon phase but the actual work that I am putting in myself right now is about 50 hours a week. In the winter it's about 20. Long term it'll be less than 40 and closer to $10k/week in sales during summer with about $2k/week in labor. We'll trained year round labor is what will make those numbers possible and I know it's going to be the biggest challenge but the bright side is basically anyone physically able to do this work can do it it just takes a few months to get really good. Loaded topic hard to explain here but just getting the conversation going to see more people get interested in farming.
@GreenFoxGardens1985 Thank you for replying. I thought it was a better idea to specialize on 3 or 4 things. You will definitely sell everything you have in farmers' markets anyway. But I understand that diversity also can bring profit, dedicating more time and effort in learning or mastering a huge amount of different plants. Best regards
P.S. I’m sure you already know this, but mixing sand and clay doesn’t make concrete lol. I’m in the opposite situation here in the south with my soil-it’s a loamy sand, so I have tremendous leaching of nutrients. I’ve considered adding some clay to it, but for now I’m just growing in it and adding as much compost and organic mulch to it as I can to try to transform its texture a bit.
Yep I'm trying like crazy to change my texture and it's really tough. Compost isn't doing it for me so I'm trying more permanent solutions. Supposedly peat moss helps a lot but I've tried that too.
Boss man ask google what you get when you mix clay and sand it will tell you you will get a hard substance please don’t add sand you need high quality bio compost, charcoal , hummus etc more organic matter leaf mold
I raise bees and produce honey. Folks do not realize the capital investment to get to the production levels that I am at. Plus processing equipment. Next project is to mass grow lavender.
@@farmtablewest5991 The money required to be as large as I am to even compete with me on the honey market will make most people shy away from it but I can also supply them with queens so its a double edge sword.
@farmtablewest5991 riverton but I'm a medical courier and drive from riverton to cody and back every weekday. We love your videos. Thanks for the great content neighbor
Planted 4 rows 4o plants each of tomatillo. Plants got huge and are not producing really. Not sure what’s going on with it. Gotta be the variety I am assuming. Have some more from the field that has reliable plants. Farming is gambling for sure
@@farmtablewest5991 we had a couple weeks of 110 and above not sure if that played into it. New subscriber from zone 9b. Good luck. Do a little more each day. Except the rest days lol
@@farmtablewest5991I started this RUclips a little over a month ago following some stuff around the farm. I am the smoke account. Finally got some purple on the fruit(tomatillo)
And $4000/wk is just during harvest season. I’m in Wisconsin and we really only have 3 months of harvestable product to sell (August- October). So $4000/wk x 12= $48,000/yr GROSS. I’m thinking your neck of the woods is probably the same.
I put sand in my clay base garden and when I stopped farming I opened it to the horses and they don’t make a dent but around where I didn’t put sand is softer
One of the best videos on this topic I've ever seen - honest, insightful, invaluable. Thank you Sir.
thanks man. Really appreciate it!
this inspires a small home gardener with big dreams like myself, thank you for sharing!
So nice of you
Nothing but respect and admiration for what you do. I’m in a. Bigger city central Wyo, I had a market garden farmers market set up for 8 yrs until downtown coalition and the city tanked my market.
I’ve scaled back to large garden and growing for winter storage because of the state of our food system and the prices. I also grow out rare varieties and list in seed savers exchange based in Iowa.
I did all my work my self with very occasional help from a nephew, I know what it takes to pull this off.
Excellent video keeping it very real.
Thanks much appreciated. My goal is to get more people doing this by showing a sustainable way to farm.
What a great, realistic, story. I know what you mean about those weeds! Keep it up you have great drive.
Thank you!
I'm building a permaculture market garden bit by bit. Every time I get a cheque I buy something, seeds, irrigation pipe, drippers, chicken wire, fences, trees. An upcoming project is a greenhouse, but I'm building a fenced outdoor garden at the moment.
Irrigation is a MUST!!! Nothing else happens without the Irrigation!
Living in Zone 9B helps, I can grow something all year round.
It's hard work. I have a horse, sheep and chickens that provide manure and that's my fertiliser. That DEFINITELY helps!!!
It can be done, but you need to be creative. Permaculture stacking helps. Syntropic Agroforestry helps. Owning your own land and living off-grid lowers your overheads and means you can pump more money into your farm!
Grow some annuals for quick cashflow, but put in perennial crops, for the future. Learn to propagate your own perennial crop plants.
I am a Multi-Generational Smallholder, BTW. My place is not making a profit yet, but one day it will.
I hope all this info helps.
God Bless!
Thanks! This is different than permaculture built more as a six figure business long term but I'm gonna goof around with permaculture for me eventually.
@@farmtablewest5991 Hi just wanted to say that from watching this one video I couldn't tell what you're doing exactly other than growing veg. You didn't mention if you're organic cert. or no-till-no-dig or regenerative ag. which encompasses many things.
If you're regenerative, then the goal would be to continually grow the quality of the soil through different inputs, along with keeping something growing at all times if possible. I imagine you get bad winters there so I don't know what's possible to grow over the winter in open fields. Whatever it is has to be terminated and then planted into and the dead cover crop becomes the mulch for the field, but of course that doesn't go so well with those paper pot planters
I've seen a LOT of video from some really good regenerative farmers, and they're not very keen on permaculture, because the very thing you're doing, which is high-density, high profit crop farming, it doesn't lend itself well to permaculture. This doesn't change the fact that having hedge rows with different perennial food items or flowers to help bring in the pollinators can't be put into place because I see that often in the type of farming you're doing, but they're on the boundaries of a field with maybe one hedge row passing through the center of the field.
As you said farming is tough and it takes time and other than incorporating hedge rows around the boundaries and even planting trees if you have the land to grow you're own wood for harvesting to make wood mulch, the main thing I think I'd focus on is building the quality of those outside beds through continual inputs and that will eventually fix the issue with the clay soil.
No-Till Growers and Richard Perkins have both been very informative for me but I still have about 3 years before I start and for now I'm just raised bed gardening.
Really good video.
As a side note in the right environments permaculture CAN be highly profitable, but I personally think it's better employed in subtropical or tropical environments which is what I'll be doing
@@johndoh5182 im only growing veg and making content like this. I agree with all you said about permaculture. Love Richard Perkins and No Till Growers.
I can already tell you. It's a hella lotta work. I did an organic farm internship in 1997. Gal was from a rich family. I wasn't. At the end of summer I moved off the island and started a housecleaning business and was fully booked in 2 months. Why? Cleaning houses was easier and I'm not from a rich family.
Yes, vegetables take a hella lot of water. More than you think. People have no idea. Dragging 100-foot hoses isn't fun.
Yea sounds like you've done it too. It's not easy at all.
When a person says "organic", I think of a certain thing, and that is meeting the requirements of whatever state they are in to receive that certification.
When I hear terms like "no-till", "no-dig", "regenerative agriculture", "permaculture", those have very different meanings, and trying to achieve "organic" without using these other methods is INCREDIBLY hard.
You seem to want to point to a fallacy, which is you have to come from a wealthy family to have success in this but I watch many channels that not only cover what they've gone through but cover other farms and people are often coming from a position of very little, starting with nothing more than a loan, or they don't own land and rent it, or many other situations. The first thing to understand if you want to do this particular type of farming is regenerative agriculture, because those very methods is pretty encompassing and implies minimal soil disturbance and organic. The next thing to know is how to run a business. And while I list "how to run a business" as second, the very people that get shown in videos often list that as no. 1.
There are people that make good money farming 1/4 acre. But, they have access to the organic materials they need to keep building up their soil quality which is the main input for regenerative ag. depending on soil quality. If you already excellent soil then planting a winter cover crop that can be terminated in the Spring starts to become all you need although every few years they still tend to need a good dumping of compost into their beds.
Regenerative ag. tends to cut down on the amount of water you need BTW, except for those crops that require a lot of water like celery.
Good channel, No-Till Growers. If you have a yard, grow food using those techniques and you might figure out how to scale up again and maybe understand something you didn't before.
I've seen farms where they use nothing but rain-water. They capture rain water and store it. Didn't need a $10,000 well.
Appreciate the brutal honesty. Thank you. I haven't taken the plunge you have, still testing the waters and slowly building up skills and infrastructure. Good to know what it really takes to get things truly profitable. Also good to hear a recommendation about Neversink Farm's course. I really admire that farm, I can't afford the course right now, but it does appear to be well worth it. Something I'll have to be patient about. There's a lot of patience needed in the farming game as well.
Oh yea. I had my eye on the course for 2 years before I took it. Basically has been a 6 year process to get where I'm at now. Not easy.
I’m in Cody almost every week because I do produce deliveries. Good to see fresh produce being grown in that area. I would recommend checking with the health food stores in that area, Thermopolis, Riverton, Worland.
Thanks so much. What produce do you deliver?
I work for Spokane Produce, so quite a bit of stuff. But I know at least 3 ladies I can maybe put you in contact with, who own health food stores who are always looking for fresh reliable organic produce. The produce that we ship doesn’t always make it in top condition when it’s Organic, it has it’s great moments depending where it’s coming from but nothing beats local. I live in WA and am planning on starting a market garden, hopefully by next spring, so I’m happy that you’re making progress!
@@CarlosJimenez_93 people helping people. You love to see it!
I would come work for you just so I could get out of California.
@JohnDoe-id9hi ok let's talk
So many people romanticize it and make it look so easy, well I work on three different produce farms in my area and it’s the furthest thing from easy.
Nothing is easy about picking cherry Tom’s in a 95° high tunnel in the middle of July. lol
Great video! Gained a new follower. 👍🏼
Exactly. I was hoping to relate to real growers with this video. Thank you.
@@farmtablewest5991 don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing I’d rather be spending my time/energy/lifeforce doing. I love it. But it ain’t for the faint of heart. Keeping it real. I like it.
You have some super high quality information, thanks for posting!
My pleasure!
Reality is not negative.
Thanks for sharing your reality.
Ive recently been bitten hard by the gardening bug and am in the very early stages of creating an income.
I'm lucky in that I'm in zone 7 with a substantial southern facing slope I plan to take advantage of with the addition of green houses down the road but will start with simple row covers just to see how long I can extend a season and how early I can start the next.
I definitely plan to get a small tractor to do most if not all of the hard work but that will be a mission unto itself!
Good luck to you and I'm sure a larger metro area will pan out and bring good $$$
Thanks so much.
if you have the space to dedicate to large mound of wood chips for a few years, you will be able to improve your soil considerably. i did all that before i planted my little orchard / food forest because of the weeds and horrible soil i had. i do not need to water as much since i have 2' of aged wood chips over all of my orchard. i do not have to weed because i killed them all with fresh wood chips in the beginning. now all i have to do is to continually improve fertility which i have done. every year i get better yield with less work. i started in the 80's and the soil conversion took me longer because i am not rich! it took me 10yrs of easy work since most of the work was done by my loader. but all that time completely changed my soil. after the 3rd year i planted cover crops and added fertility. then i started planting. you can do the same thing one section at a time. if you do it right, chips become excellent compost in 3yrs. it is ideal if you have chickens as they will scratch, eat bugs, and poop all over your mound. in fact they will probably not leave your mound! that saves you on feed too. then you can use the aged chips on your beds as the years go by. i make mounds for beds with them. harvesting is also much easier. i just harvested garlic all as big as the largest apples you have seen. i just stuck my hand in and pulled them out. no shovel needed. that is how fluffy my soil is now. and full of life. and it holds nutrients and water. you just need a large enough space for the chip truck to dump at least 10 truck loads. the mounds will be half the height after the 1st yr. and 2/3 after the 2nd. rake off the top chunky chips and below will be black gold!
Nice! I can't really do that with the system I use to produce. But I do add 1 inch of compost at least per year and weeds are les and less of a problem every year.
@@farmtablewest5991 yeah, situations make all the difference. you can do things well. you can do thing quickly. you can do things cheaply. choose any two! i had to do things well since that is just who i am. i had to do things cheaply since i am poor. so i had to do it slowly. thankfully i started when i was young as you have. it will get easier. i wish you all the best. we need to move away from the failing industrial corporate farming that is ruining everything.
I plan on doing a permaculture forest on my parents land with a similar method. They have 30 acres and we’re going to gather all the fallen wood and clear small trees and brush and chip it all, then make up a bunch of Johnson-Su Bioreactors with the chips and fall leaves. By the next fall it will have broken down into black gold, just like if you pile it in mounds, just faster. Then next fall we’ll spread it thick in our first orchard section and plant out our orchard trees and bushes and start the process all over, adding a section each year. Going to be enlarging the existing pond and hooking up a solar pump to an existing well, then run main lines to the orchard and set up drip. At the same time, close to the house we’ll be putting in an in ground market garden setup using mini beds (look up herrick kimball mini beds) for all the annual produce. I’ve been trialing in ground gardening with tomatoes in woven ground cover and they have been doing amazing. In fact way better than I expected and no irrigation needed so far even with 6 weeks of high temps and no rain (SE Oklahoma 7b).
@@RustyBobbins yup. except that you are going with a lot less thickness than i did. my entire orchard is under 2' of chips and the raised bed mounds are another 2' on top of that. this is why i have no weeds at all. the animal tracked and wind blown weeds are easily picked off during my daily activity and at most takes 30min/day. you would need more than all the plants in your 30 acres to cover an acre of land with aged chips this high. it would also damage the rest of the eco system. it is quite astonishing how much volume is lost through the process. over the years i built up this pile, there have been close to a thousand truckloads of chips delivered from 5 arborist companies. even with the reactors, i would doubt you could build that thick a layer in one year but it certainly will shorten your time. on the other hand, you will get going faster even with a thinner layer and can build it up over the years. what i did was to go full depth in one section and use it while i built up another section the following year. i had some serious weed problems like bindweed and japanese knotweed.
30 acres would be awesome. i would have all sorts of wildlife areas and ponds all over. you will do just fine. it is a lot of work though. pace yourself. you don't want to hurt yourself. i hurt myself plenty when i was young and all of them come back and haunt you when you get old. it is a marathon. develop a pace and keep at it. in time you can make awesome things happen. generating food is smart. if the covid taught us one thing, it is that the supply system is very fragile. the less you depend on the rest of the world, the more resilient you will be. good to see young people getting back to the land. you give me hope for the future of this land 🙂
btw, the easiest way to grow both potatoes and tomatoes is in a mound with nothing else to buy. as the plant gets taller, you increase the height of the mound. you will have more root to support more tomatoes and you will have layers of potatoes. i do not use plastic in most cases. really the only time is for poly-carbonate for my greenhouses and pond liners. i stay away from fads that want to sell me stuff. i use nature as a guide and ally. i do not even buy organic fertilizer. i have lived on less than $10/yr for the past 20+yrs. stay close to nature and be well 🙂
Soil works GSR what his channel a good soil test and figuring if you need potassium or calcium or etc you can loosen your soil but when you mix clay and sand that is the recipe for cement
I am adding both of those according to soil test. If it was cement I'd know by now.
Thank you for sharing, good video!
Thank you too
4k a week, 10k a week, these numbers are hard to imagine. I think it's be helpful to know, how much do YOU make? Still, thanks for your insight!
It's hard to explain in a short video. I'm still reinvesting a lot into the farm for another 2-3 years so soon I'll pay myself about $2400/month but it'll go up a lot more once the farm is fully invested.
Excellent 😊🎉
I subscribed to your channel 🙏
Thanks for the sub!
@@farmtablewest5991 definitely welcome 😁
I put sand in my clay base garden and when I stopped farming I opened it to the horses and they don’t make a dent but around where I didn’t put sand is softer
Starting small while still working off site helps. Reinvest any farm income is key. Know your area market & preplan for future end goal (build up with reinvesting).
yep I totally agree.
Thanks for keeping it real
I'll always try for that on this channel.
Thank you for uploading this valuable video with very realistic and accurate information. One question, is it not easier to grow only 3 or 4 types of produce without spreading yourself too thin? For example, tomatoes, celery, sparragus and salanova?
That way, you can concentrate the effort to grow very good yields instead of trying to grow a bunch of things that are not profitable.
Please let me know. Your insight is really appreciated.
I used to think that but the problem is it's difficult to sell huge volumes of one thing unless your selling to a big wholesaler or have a market like Chicago. This style is much more versatile in smaller markets and everything I grow is very profitable.
Yes, you are correct that focusing on around six crops is going to be more profitable in the long run. I used to farm like the young man in this video, and while the money is extremely good (he is not lying) the amount of work it requires does not justify the profit, in my opinion. I think this guy is still in the honey moon phase of market gardening, where the money is good and you neglect the amount of work you are putting in to make said money.
I used to grow 20 crops and now I grow around 8 and I make just as much money as I did before while halving my workload. In my area no one grows broccoli/cauliflower, so I have completely cornered that market. You want to focus your time on growing difficult to grow crops that have little to no processing time. Carrots are another good one.
@GreenFoxGardens1985 so I am definitely in the honeymoon phase but the actual work that I am putting in myself right now is about 50 hours a week. In the winter it's about 20. Long term it'll be less than 40 and closer to $10k/week in sales during summer with about $2k/week in labor. We'll trained year round labor is what will make those numbers possible and I know it's going to be the biggest challenge but the bright side is basically anyone physically able to do this work can do it it just takes a few months to get really good. Loaded topic hard to explain here but just getting the conversation going to see more people get interested in farming.
@GreenFoxGardens1985 Thank you for replying. I thought it was a better idea to specialize on 3 or 4 things. You will definitely sell everything you have in farmers' markets anyway. But I understand that diversity also can bring profit, dedicating more time and effort in learning or mastering a huge amount of different plants. Best regards
Cool video, thanks man. Good luck Saturday.
P.S. I’m sure you already know this, but mixing sand and clay doesn’t make concrete lol. I’m in the opposite situation here in the south with my soil-it’s a loamy sand, so I have tremendous leaching of nutrients. I’ve considered adding some clay to it, but for now I’m just growing in it and adding as much compost and organic mulch to it as I can to try to transform its texture a bit.
Yep I'm trying like crazy to change my texture and it's really tough. Compost isn't doing it for me so I'm trying more permanent solutions. Supposedly peat moss helps a lot but I've tried that too.
Boss man ask google what you get when you mix clay and sand it will tell you you will get a hard substance please don’t add sand you need high quality bio compost, charcoal , hummus etc more organic matter leaf mold
im already adding those like crazy. sand is in very small amounts.
@@farmtablewest5991 I figured that I love your farm keep up the great work I’m a little jealous lol
17$ a hour i work 80 hours a week love farming
good for you! Me too!
What about part of your labour is volunteer that are paid with veggies?
I raise bees and produce honey. Folks do not realize the capital investment to get to the production levels that I am at. Plus processing equipment. Next project is to mass grow lavender.
Yep infrastructure is everything and where the real investment is
@@farmtablewest5991 The money required to be as large as I am to even compete with me on the honey market will make most people shy away from it but I can also supply them with queens so its a double edge sword.
Omg I literally drive by your ace everyday.
Stop and buy. you won't regret it
Really? Where do you live?
@farmtablewest5991 riverton but I'm a medical courier and drive from riverton to cody and back every weekday. We love your videos. Thanks for the great content neighbor
@@danetstruna1825 holy cow that's a hike. Thanks for your support!
Thank you for sharing 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻
Thank you too
Where do you sell your veggie ?
Farmers Markets mostly, restaurants and small veggie box program.
I Hire senior citizens They need the money supply lunch and they will come
This is pretty tough work for senior citizens.
Direct sow or transplant dill /cilantro?
Paperpot. It's a game changer.
Transplant
If you could make $4,000 a week, everyone would be doing it. That's over $200,000 a year. Every farmer would be doing this.
It's a lot more complicated than that. The farm makes that much. Eventually much more.
Also I explain how insanely difficult it is to get to this point in this video. That's why very few do it.
Planted 4 rows 4o plants each of tomatillo. Plants got huge and are not producing really. Not sure what’s going on with it. Gotta be the variety I am assuming. Have some more from the field that has reliable plants. Farming is gambling for sure
Fruiting plants are fickle.
@@farmtablewest5991 we had a couple weeks of 110 and above not sure if that played into it. New subscriber from zone 9b. Good luck. Do a little more each day. Except the rest days lol
@@farmtablewest5991I started this RUclips a little over a month ago following some stuff around the farm. I am the smoke account. Finally got some purple on the fruit(tomatillo)
You probubly need to pull some of your labor from people in other areas who want to intern to learn, gain experience.
Working on it
And $4000/wk is just during harvest season. I’m in Wisconsin and we really only have 3 months of harvestable product to sell (August- October). So $4000/wk x 12= $48,000/yr GROSS. I’m thinking your neck of the woods is probably the same.
Yes it's $4,000/week during those months but we also harvest year round. Average $2,000/week all others.
Hey you're mic fucking hurt my ears man
Turn volume down?
I put sand in my clay base garden and when I stopped farming I opened it to the horses and they don’t make a dent but around where I didn’t put sand is softer