- Hey, hey, what's going on?
As you can see, there's a different background behind me
than in my other videos.
I'm gonna be shooting a lot of me talking
the A-roll stuff from my home office now.
So that's super exciting and what's even more exciting
is that I've been able to pay for this house
and for this office and for all my expenses
with my microgreens business.
So it's amazing to see how far my microgreens business
has come and I'm sure that you are probably interested
in knowing what it entails to run this business.
You know, what am I doing on a daily basis?
So I wanted to make this video for you to really
just show you what I'm doing in the mornings, right?
I'm gonna make a few videos like this but I wanted show you
my AM chores, my morning tasks.
This is what I do every single morning, it doesn't change
and this is one of my responsibilities
that I still do for my business at this point.
I'm working less than 10 hours a week
and I'm still pulling a salary of over 60 grand
from that business.
So it's definitely working out well
and this was one of my goals when I started my business,
I didn't wanna be working, you know every day,
slaving over the business.
I wanted to have a business that can kind of run itself
and have my freedom of time.
So, and there's nothing wrong with, you know
working a lot of hours for your business.
Of course, it's totally fine in the beginning
and maybe that's what you wanna do.
You know everybody's goal is different for their business
but one of the things that was important for me
is working less, but still making money.
So, I'm excited to show you right here in this video
exactly what I do in the mornings when I head into the farm.
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So I've been running my business for a few years now.
I'm in my fifth year of business and it's been going great.
Like I said before, you know,
one of my goals was to not spend all my time
slaving over the business but was to make it more hands-off,
something that could bring revenue in for me
but I didn't really have to be there all the time
or be working all the time.
One of the things that I got really good at
is designing systems and putting these systems in place
to get the things done and to keep the business moving
and then you know, kinda have other people do that work
and that type of thing.
But, with that being said I do still wanna keep
a little bit hands on with the business
and I wanted to show you in this video, you know
what I do in the morning, I'm gonna take you step-by-step
through the process, so let's jump right into it.
All right, we're hearing the Finest Foods Urban Farm.
I'm gonna do some morning chores.
These are the morning tasks that I do every morning.
It's really just getting in here, washing my hands, you know
moving some trays around the room and then watering
is really the morning chores.
And then after that it gets into tray making
and harvesting and all that, but in this video
I'm just gonna do the morning chores.
(water whooshing)
(paper ruffles)
All right.
I gotta grab a super rack...
(rack rumbles)
bring it around.
Now this is also a great time to unsoak seeds.
It's getting into a little later in the day,
it's around 1230 right now so I'm gonna unsoak these.
This morning I unsoaked my sunflower.
So these are already done.
I do those at 9 a.m., which is a four hour soak.
And then I let these wait until after 12
which would be the eight hours for these.
And these I always aim for between eight and 12.
(water splashes)
So it's between eight and 12 hours
on everything besides sunflower, basically.
(container rumbles)
(water splashes)
I used to just soak my seeds overnight
and I couldn't really control how long
they were being soaked for.
I would just have to do like an overnight 12 hours thing.
But, then I found this controller
and this automatically puts water on my seeds
in the middle of the night or really the early morning
so that way I don't have to worry about doing that manually.
And then by the time I get in at least the sunflowers
are ready to be on soaked so it improves my efficiency
and resilience.
So I got my board up here.
It looks like today is Saturday.
We're taking out 10 radish and one micromix.
So, it looks like this is them.
(cloth ruffles)
Wipe off the bottom of the weighted trays
so that's ready to go for next time.
(rack rumbles)
And then I'm wiping these down to keep the racks
as clean as possible.
Not only at a super rack, but...
the main grow racks out there as well.
And you don't want stuff falling
into the trays beneath either.
(trays rattle)
Normally, I would want these to be a little bit taller
when they come out of germination.
But the problem right now is it just got really
cold here in New York and my temperature control
throughout the whole building is not perfect.
So my germination room is at 65 right now
and I prefer it closer to 68.
All right so we got these trays.
I'm gonna bring them out under lights.
(rack rumbles)
It's not much room on that side
so I'm gonna come on this side
And I'm typically just looking for a good way
to put these out.
There's no perfect solution right now
so I'm just going to start a new row.
(trays rattle)
You need those steady trays so you can do
one handed tray movements.
All right.
Looking good.
Hey, so I'm sitting here editing this video
and I just realized that my morning chores
are different on a harvest day than on a normal day.
So what you're seeing here is a normal day.
If this was a harvest day at this moment in time
where we're putting the trays out under lights
that were in germination, at the same time
that we're putting them out we would also be pulling
any trays that were for that day's harvest
and we'd be pulling them off the racks
and lowering them onto the super rack
and then wheeling that over next to the harvesting station.
And the reason being is that we're pulling them now
because we don't want them to get watered that day.
We want the crop to be nice and dry when it's harvested.
And then also a watering is little messy
so when you water them, there'd be a chance of getting water
on the canopies of the trays that were to be
harvested that day and that's obviously
the opposite of what you want.
You wanna be harvesting dry crops.
So I just wanted to make this note here
that this is a normal day.
If it was a harvesting day, we would be pulling any trays
that were gonna be harvested that day off
of the racks at this moment and onto the super rack.
(racks rumble)
Back to this watering.
Always turn off your hose when you're not using it.
I had a hose blow out once, and if I wasn't in here
it would have flooded out the whole place.
(hose rumbles)
(water splashes)
I keep the hose underneath my leg
and that prevents the dirty hose
from getting near the plants and touching the plants.
Before I jump into the watering though,
go down under the comments for me and just let me know
what is your least favorite farm chore?
I just wanna know.
Please just let me know in the comments
what is that one thing that you just hate doing
for your business?
If I'm being honest here, I think probably
watering is the most annoying thing
that I have to do but that's probably
because that's like the one thing I'm still doing every day.
The tray making that I do a few days a week
it's only a few days a week.
I also love tray making, so that's not too bad.
But then if my, if my worker is out
and I actually have to do the harvesting
that's a pain in the ass.
Although, since I don't do much harvesting anymore
it's kind of refreshing to get into that groove again.
So I have to say overall watering is the most annoying
to me, but let me know in the comments
what you hate doing in your farm.
(water fizzes)
(upbeat music)
Watering will vary based on a few different things.
It's based on variety.
It's based on how old each variety is.
And then also based on how heavy the trays are
when you go to grab them.
I noticed that these were a little bit heavier
which means there's more water
in that soil and they don't need as much water
(upbeat music)
Now as you can see, I'm moving the trays
along the shelf as I go down because that'll prevent
any of these little leaves from being trapped inside
the tray right next to it.
So I slide over using that little bit
of extra space on the rack.
And then I'll do this one.
And then I'll kinda lift this one off
and water and slide it over.
I'm keeping this side down so it's not pinching
these leaves but I can still slide it
over to here and then let this side down
without pinching those leaves.
(water fizzes)
Just like that.
(upbeat music)
these sunflowers are pretty developed.
They're getting a pretty decent canopy at this point
but I'm gonna top water anyway
because I want these holes to loosen up
and really get off of the plants.
I seeded these very dense because I'm testing
out some new seeds.
I didn't really know any better.
So I really wanna get some of these holes off
so that way when it comes time to harvest
it's not gonna be as big of a pain in the butt.
The plants are getting wet at that point, but that's okay
'cause we still have at least another three days
before they're gonna get harvested
so that's plenty of time for them to dry back off
before harvesting.
(upbeat music)
This is all my cilantro.
This is just one week apart.
They probably grow better with two lights
versus the one that I commonly use
and you can see this tray actually has more holes on it.
And that's because I didn't leave this in germination
as long as this one.
So the longer you leave cilantro in germination the better.
It'll help pop off those holes.
(upbeat music)
Those are just coming out of germination.
We put those out this morning so you wanna make sure
to give them a nice hefty water
'cause they haven't had water in three days
since you made the trays.
(upbeat music)
All right so that's all the watering.
It's not done with the whole process yet
'cause we still have to wipe off the holes.
I'm gonna do that right now.
But as you can see, I mean, I got that done
in about 15 minutes and there's well over a hundred trays.
So this doesn't take that much time to do watering this way.
You don't need an automatic watering system
especially when you're first getting started.
I mean, I've been in business for four years.
I'm definitely at scale and even still,
this type of watering is totally working for me.
All right.
Try not to get this tangled.
Always turn that off and then we'll go swipe some holes.
So you always wanna start off with your cleanest,
your oldest plants and then just get down in there
and ruffle them up.
(leaves ruffle)
Is it annoying?
Yes.
Is it a deal breaker?
No.
Can you still make money growing sunflowers doing this?
Yes.
And I mean, look at these trays, this is complete fluff.
We're probably pulling two pounds off of these
and I sell that for 40 bucks.
So a little bit of time each day
does not add up to anything close to 40 bucks.
Some of the plants will get damaged a little bit.
That's all right.
Gotta get these holes off though
otherwise harvesting is crazy.
That'll take forever.
This doesn't take that long.
(leaves ruffle)
All right so you just saw exactly
what I'm doing in my mornings for my microgreens business
to keep it running smoothly.
I hope it was useful to see, you know
what I'm doing in the farm and how I'm running it
and how I'm doing some of these more chores.
So hopefully that was helpful for you.
I hope it was.
But if you want more information
and want just kinda like a more deeper dive
on specific topics in the microgreens business world,
definitely go check out the product I launched
with David from Micro Acres up in Canada.
The product has been going really well,
we've gotten a lot of good feedback
and we actually just added in a kind of like bonus feature
to the program where we're gonna do a live Q and A
with all the members once a quarter.
So that's a new thing that we're doing
starting here in April.
So if you haven't already checked out that program
now is probably the best time to go check it out
as we start adding more features into it.
So you can find that at microgreensmentors.com.
You'll see a video in there to learn
a little bit more about it but we're also adding
this additional feature where you can ask us questions
once a quarter, me and Dave at the same time.
Check out the videos below to learn
how to optimize your farm for the best layout.
Or watch the other video if you wanna learn
all the different supplies and equipment that you need
to actually start this business and run the business.
If you liked this video, be sure to hit that
like button below, subscribe to my YouTube channel
and don't forget that you can use that share button below
to share it with anybody you think this might help.
Thanks again and I'll see you next time.