"There's no use crying over spilled seed."

On Friday, October 2, during week #17, I was instructing and overseeing a couple of Cincinnati State students who were direct-seeding collards into a high tunnel with an EarthWay seeder--the model we have is an older. We planted three beds at 30 inches wide with three rows in each bed and 16 inches of space between each row. The seeds were planted with a modified lettuce plate in the EarthWay. Charles filed down the finger-like grabbers of the seed plate so that the right amount of seed would be pulled out of the hopper and dropped down the chute. This is to achieve the right amount of seed to be planted.

We figured out which seed plate to use and knew to modify a plate because we calculated the amount of seed dropping out of the hopper by preparing the seeder to plant. This also included adding seed to the hopper and turning the wheel one full rotation as we caught the seed coming out of the shoot. After one full wheel rotation, we divided the number of seeds that came out by the number of holes on the seed plate until we got the average amount of seed we wanted to be planted from a specific seed plate.

We planted the collard seed thick; many seeds were planted in a cluster, in a row, and in close succession, in the hopes that many plants would come up. Once the seedlings were at, or just past, their first true leaf stage, the farm crew and myself came back through and thinned the seedlings to about 6 inches between each plant--the proper spacing between plants for future mature plants. At the same time, we harvested the seedling plants that we pulled out of the ground for--you guessed it--baby collard sprouts, which we ended up adding to our Braising Green's Mix.

Anyway, a "little" bit of seed was spilled while the students and myself were emptying it out of the EarthWay seeder back into the collard's seed bag. This requires picking up the entire planter and precariously positioning a corner in order to funnel the seeds out of the hopper into the bag...
But, alas, a minute miscalculation between the seed-bag holder and the person dumping the EarthWay ended with quite a bit of spilled seed in the soil.

We picked up as much seed as possible to later be sorted and sifted out--a painstaking and very detailed process where one almost needs a magnifying glass. I thought we were able to salvage the majority of the seed from the dirt since it generally fell in one pile. After a week and a half, though, I realized our salvaging efforts weren't necessarily a waste but also weren't as thorough as I thought. Rather, I had a whole other puzzle on my hands with a couple massive clumps of baby collards springing forth from an area in the soil about the size of three or four note cards.

So, instead of throwing my hands up in the air and calling it quits, at that moment, a seed sprouted in the rich soil of my mind. I grabbed a few 72-transplant trays--black plastic trays that have seventy-two empty cells--and began digging up clumps of seedling mass. Luckily, the seedlings were still at the white thread stage, wherein the roots of the seedling are singular, look like a single white thread, and are easy to separate from the roots of the other seedlings.

This step in transplanting is a little more than tedious and requires some breath-holding. The cool part of transplanting like this, though, is that I was able to see the germination of many seeds. Normally, when seeds are directly planted into trays of soil, about a 20% loss is accounted for. So, instead of planting a singular seed in a singular cell and hoping it is a good seed that sprouts well, I had the opportunity to pick the strongest seedlings from a mass of high-pressure, competitive sprouting conditions.

Now, those strong seedlings each have their own cell of soil, nutrients, and water availability. More or less, I replanted the best seedlings that would later be transplanted to grow into fully mature plants. In the spring, these would be harvested over and over again! When you think about this in terms of revenue, it's huge. I could have given up on those seedling clumps, considered it a loss of seeds, and pulled them out to add to the braising mix. Instead, I took an opportunity to fine tune plant selection for future crops and what will eventually be profits.