Harvesting for REKO

So it's another busy harvest and pack day. We had a big harvest and pack yesterday for our main Karlstadt deliveries, and then today is Sune and Torsby. But we've also got a new Rico point starting in Arvica, where Carla was busy doing markets all last year to build up a momentum to set that up for this year. So a glimpse of what it looks like, harvesting, packing, getting chickens and eggs and things ready for delivery as we hot up things for our open day on Saturday. So we've got a complete new harvest on Friday for people coming to the farm. On Pac day. We have lists that are generated from our spreadsheets for all the private sales as well as all our restaurant sales. So today we're delivering to two Ricoh points and about a dozen restaurants. And yesterday, similar sort of thing to a big Rico and a bunch of other collections that go on as well. And then tomorrow it's a harvest day again for the open day. So we'll be selling off excess veg and just making up bunches to make a really nice veg wall. So lots of eggs going up, beautiful eggs. We're getting. Full to the brim now it's time for packing. So plenty of fresh chicken going out and we've got chicken and brine for smoking. We're going to put them on tomorrow morning. These are actually going to be for the open day. We're serving 70 lunches already and probably a couple of hundred people will show up at the farm on Saturday. You never know with our open dates. We don't ask people to confirm when they're coming, but the last couple of years in a row we've had a couple of hundred. And so we do a big farm tour. We sell lunches that are pre ordered and then we have fika, like coffee and tea and homemade cookies. And then we'll be selling all kinds of veg and chickens and smoked chickens to whoever's coming to have a look around. Beautiful cucumbers coming out of the tunnel now. First, carrots going in. This week we've had bad germination and patchy beds, but looking beautiful. I've explained in other videos, we don't put veg in totes. We're packing and sorting into these grey crates because we use them for all other products. And then these come out last minute and we pack before we leave. Here's Mesclin, for example. So it's a bit of an orchestration, but that's the size of the chiller that we've got. And so that's what we work with. Lots of tomatoes, selling fruit right now. And we'll be coming through here again, pruning, stringing. I showed you clips of this in the last video, but it's looking great in here. And a lot of cucumbers will be pulling out for sale at the open day. So as you can see from the drone footage, the guns are looking in pretty good health. Now, we've done a lot of bed turnover, sorting out some Apache beds, and as plants get bigger, they're obviously rooting through into ground below some of the patchy compost that we've explained in other videos. But, yeah, farms looking great. Mid summer and busy days now. Sales really ramp up at the end of July and stay level through hopefully August, September, October. So harvest is done at the appropriate time for different crops. Everything vulnerable, salads, etc. We harvest in the morning that things go out. And that's why our veg is always so fresh. We're harvesting as we go out. And things that can be harvested on a regular basis, peas, beans, things like courgettes, they'll get harvested when they're ready and we'll keep on top of those and have them in the chiller for up to a few days before things go out. And selling chickens and smoked chickens too, too. So veg box one is cucumber, carrots, onions, peas, me mix. So when we're packing, we try and get a little work close together and we always pack the bags with same vegetables in the same place, which helps whoever's checking the next point can then quality control if someone's forgotten something. These are pretty simple boxes with just a few varieties, but when there's big boxes with 20 varieties in, then you would want to have some quality control process with the last person in line checking the quality control of the whole thing. This we've got three different assemblies of boxes. Second box is beans, zucchini, beets, chard, dill and parsley. Then the third box will be micros, mesmer, kale, chard and sugar snaps. And then we have different restaurant orders that we'll be compiling out of the rest of it, which is all here, ready to go. Very nice. Beautiful fresh greenery. So box three, kales, chards, micros, peas, microgreens. So super busy days to get ready for the open day. It's always a big event, but nice for the interns to see that before they leave. It's a big part of our outreach and how we communicate with both our local customer base as well as you know international people that want to come and visit the farm. I'm leaving you with a shot of my Idalys Incredible Tomatoes, one of my favorite tomatoes. And I hope you found that video useful. You can find out a whole bunch more in our online training. It's still by far the cheapest and most comprehensive organized online training for regenerative agriculture, covering all kinds of things about farm design, enterprise design, holistic management, how we actually do all the stuff on the ground. So join that if you want to learn more, you can see in the links below and we'll see you in a video very soon. Bye for now. Sam.