Fed up with the garden

[Yander]

My spending money as a kid came from growing tomatoes for the local shipper who took our farms peaches.
I hate chickens for this reason.
About 3 times a week I would pick and pack my tomatoes. I'd bring them into the open bay of the barn to pack. You couldn't keep the F'nn free range chickens out of them. Don't dare take a break or go to the bathroom. They'd be all over the trailer.
The kicker was the yard out front had all sorts of tomatoes that had been thrown out just for them.
They wanted number one fresh.
A rooster paid the ultimate price for his tomato fetish.
I caught him on the trailer one afternoon and threw a large tomato at him. Direct hit in the head killed him.
Old man was pissed at me not so much for killing the rooster but that he had to clean him when it was mid80s outside.

That's funny. Chickens are motivated by food and defy all sense of safety to get to it.

They cannot be trained but they can be conditioned a little bit. You have to be willing to kill one along the way though for the others to see.

... So I've heard anyway

 

[LouNY]

My spending money as a kid came from growing tomatoes for the local shipper who took our farms peaches.
I hate chickens for this reason.
About 3 times a week I would pick and pack my tomatoes. I'd bring them into the open bay of the barn to pack. You couldn't keep the F'nn free range chickens out of them. Don't dare take a break or go to the bathroom. They'd be all over the trailer.
The kicker was the yard out front had all sorts of tomatoes that had been thrown out just for them.
They wanted number one fresh.
A rooster paid the ultimate price for his tomato fetish.
I caught him on the trailer one afternoon and threw a large tomato at him. Direct hit in the head killed him.
Old man was pissed at me not so much for killing the rooster but that he had to clean him when it was mid80s outside.

Mine would have made me clean the xxxxxthing.

 

[masseyrider]

Mine would have made me clean the xxxxxthing.

I was busy packing tomatoes making money. 40 cases of tomatoes in the day, $200, a dead rooster $4-5.

 

[Yander]

First corn. small ears but very tasty. Froze 7 pints Tuesday.

 

[5030]

Next year (if I'm still alive), I'm going to plant Roundup Ready SU sweet corn instead of the non Roundup ready variety because I hate weeding so I can spray it and not weed at all. That and my usual heirloom potatoes and maybe some Cantaloupes, that is it. Everything else I can get from local truck farmers for free. Getting tired of seeing tandem axle flats going down the road, loaded with hampers of green and now red cabbage and water melons and Iceberg Lettuce and BIG Maters too. Forget the Cukes almost. All with pickup trucks being pulled by Mexicans. Just built a huge moisture sucking operation down the road for cabbage. Cabbage in the back and boxes and hampers out the front into waiting semi trucks pulling refer vans all over the county I suspect. Goes in 24-7, every day except Sunday. Even Mexicans have to rest sometimes... They double crop cabbage here. Green first then red second crop and ...

I despise the smell of a picked cabbage or sauce tomato field, they flat stink. Sauce maters go to Red-Gold in Indiana, eating maters go to the Detroit wholesale market as do melons and cukes. We have pumpkins and gourds too. Huge truck farmers down here, much like apples. We have the largest single Apple Orchard in the world about 6 miles from the farm, owned and operated by the Swindeman Family, called Applewood. They make the best apple pies in their kitchen in the processing plant too and are available to buy. Nice lattice crust pies with melt in your mouth apples and filling in the most flakey crust you ever tasted. Time to hit the fridge and cut a piece and add some Pierre's French Vanilla ice cream (after warming the pie in the microwave) of course.

 

[CalG]

We had fresh corn with this evening's supper.

Mature kernels without a hint of over ripe. and JUICEY! Look out, those ears would squirt in your eye!

Hard to beat fresh!

 

[lman]

I was curious what the tomatoes were like from the large fields that are mechanically harvested and loaded into semi trailers around here, so I stopped and grabbed a couple out of a field. They had very little flavor and were very firm compared to my garden tomatoes.

 

[LD1]

First corn. small ears but very tasty. Froze 7 pints Tuesday.

You must have gotten a late start planting.

We had fresh corn ready middle of july....and staggered about 4 plantings. Ours was done for about end of august. So we ate on it for about 6 weeks.

 

[masseyrider]

I was curious what the tomatoes were like from the large fields that are mechanically harvested and loaded into semi trailers around here, so I stopped and grabbed a couple out of a field. They had very little flavor and were very firm compared to my garden tomatoes.

They ain't designed for flavor. They'll get that when the factory adds salt and sugar.
They is growed to ripen all at once for one pick. They is tough to handle the harvester and shipping.
Dang the peoples who is gonna eat them later.

 

[5030]

I was curious what the tomatoes were like from the large fields that are mechanically harvested and loaded into semi trailers around here, so I stopped and grabbed a couple out of a field. They had very little flavor and were very firm compared to my garden tomatoes.

Tomatoes for canned tomato sauce are usually small and hard and growers will spray them to hastening ripening too. They really have no flavor and are not 'eating' maters at all. Have to be processed and cooked first and they are not hand picked per se. They are machine picked but there will be a group of migrants riding on the machine itself, sorting the good ones from the culls which they discard on the ground under the machine and they rot (and stink) in the field until the farmer gets time to apply hydrated lime to the field and that negates the acid from them and cuts the stink too. I really despise the smell of rotting maters laying in a field, in the sun and stinking. Same with cabbage, it's harvested the same way, but instead of a machine, manually by migrants and the culls (misformed heads or ones with rotting leaves are left in the field to stink as they rot until plowed under.

If it wasn't for the migrants (the same groups come every year to harvest and yes they have have 'green cards (work visa's), nothing would get picked as kids today don't want to do manual work (rather play video games and text and smoke dope) than work in the fields and it's hot and physical anyway and not something they want to do, which is why I quit making small squares of hay and sold the bailer a few years ago as I could not get any help and I'm way too old to be chucking 55 pound bales in the hay loft.

All the contract migrants are friendly, very mannerly and they all wave when they go by, unlike the kids who speed down the road in a cloud of dust in their daddy's pickup truck, oblivious to everything.

The one truck farmer down the road employs 80 migrants during harvest and they not only pick, but they run the tractors and tillage equipment too. He houses them and their families in nice housing as well (something that the State of Michigan has strict laws about and inspects the housing regularly), so don't assume ALL migrants are illegal aliens crossing the border, because they are not.

 

[WVH1977]

 

[5030]

I adore chemical weeding. Roundup Ultra Max 3.

 

[Dftodd]

We had fresh corn with this evening's supper.

Mature kernels without a hint of over ripe. and JUICEY! Look out, those ears would squirt in your eye!

Hard to beat fresh!

That's been our experience with the fresh corn we've picked up this summer. I bit into an ear of corn and shot my wife who was sitting a few feet away on the couch

 

[MAX-24-Dean]

First year our corn did not polinate in decades, had heavy rain when the tassles came out and washed the pollen away?
Only a quarter of the kernels matured in all of the corn. 4 thirty foot rows. Are biggest fail of the year.

 

[oldballs]

Yep, Mother Nature has more to do with the harvest than we do.......
sorry to hear of that crop failure...........but you'll be back next year.

Cheers,
Mike

 

[Yander]

You must have gotten a late start planting.

We had fresh corn ready middle of july....and staggered about 4 plantings. Ours was done for about end of august. So we ate on it for about 6 weeks.

Yes, I replanted on July 17th (about when you were starting to eat yours). I bush hogged and tilled the first planting because I had a big project at my son's to get done and let my garden go.

 

[goeduck]

Fantastic 2023 finish going on now. Tomato juice running down our cheeks. Potatoes and Squash up next

 

[Yander]

Those maters look they would have great flavor.

 

[goeduck]

They do. I mostly grow "small orange" size varieties that ripen well and have lots of flavor. We struggle up here with getting the big tomatoes to fully ripen, although the last 2 years they have.

 

[Oaktree]

We had fresh corn with this evening's supper.

Mature kernels without a hint of over ripe. and JUICEY! Look out, those ears would squirt in your eye!

Hard to beat fresh!

Our corn was pretty much finished by Labor Day. Not very good this year, dunno if it was just the variety I planted or the weather. Plenty of ears, but it took forever to ripen, and it almost immediately went to over-ripe and tough. Ended up making corn relish out of most of it. If mine isn't "knee high on the 4th of July", chances are we'll run out of summer before it's ripe.

Surprised you're still getting any this late this far north. My garden's finished for the year.

If it wasn't for the migrants (the same groups come every year to harvest and yes they have have 'green cards (work visa's), nothing would get picked as kids today don't want to do manual work (rather play video games and text and smoke dope) than work in the fields and it's hot and physical anyway and not something they want to do,

Was it really any different when we were young? We don't have the big truck farms in this neck of the woods, but even when I was a teen (60s) the orchards depended on itinerate workers to pick. My generation didn't really want that kind of work either, especially when there was less demanding work that paid better.