vue - Planting & Harvesting Vegetable Crops Video

http://www.virtualfarmtours.ca Learn about the crops Jeff grows and watch how they're planted and harvested. Transcript We start planting our crops generally, as they say, when we can get on the ground which means as soon as there's no frost on the ground and the snow is all melted. You can't plant in the snow very well. But normally speaking, we start as soon as we can with peas because they're a crop that enjoys cold weather at planting time. Then we move into crops that are a little more sensitive so you've got to wait for it to warm up a bit. Potatoes, cabbage, our bean crop, sweet corn, things like that where you really want the weather to be sort of what you'd call nice spring weather in order to plant those crops. The reason is because they're all from seed other than potatoes which are from a piece of potato cut into quarters. But the seed needs some warmth in order to go through a process called germination which allows it to start growing. So you need moisture, you need a little bit of soil heat, they've got to have that warmth to grow. Cabbage grows from seed but we actually grow them first into plants, what we call transplants. They're actually grown in a greenhouse so they're just like a plant you might grow in your backyard in the family garden only on a much larger scale. We have 20 acres behind me here of cabbage. That's a lot of cabbage. We grow asparagus, that's our first crop of the year. Asparagus is a perennial crop which means we plant it and it's there for 10, 15, 20 years if I look after it properly. When I say we're harvesting asparagus, that's a six week process. The second crop we move right into is strawberries. Then we move in to summer beans, we then move into sweet corn and then what we call early or new potatoes. Once we get past Labour Day we move into what we call fall harvest crops which would be storage potatoes which we'll load into storage. And then we finish the season up in the field with cabbage which we have right behind me here. This is all winter storage cabbage and we market it throughout the winter months. Many of the crops we grow we're harvesting certainly over weeks if not months.