Bay Branch Farm » jang seeder

Jang Seeder

Annabel — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 02:36:02 +0000

Last year we purchased a Jang Clean Seeder for planting rows of veggies. The past 2 weekends we have used the seeder and wanted to share an update of how it works. Since, we are still awaiting germination on most of the plants, we cannot comment too much on its precision in terms of the number of seeds it plants. However, we have deciphered the gears to use and the planting wheels to use for each of our seeds, which was no easy feat! Hoping to see beautiful rows of veggies any day now (arugula is up, but too small to tell how the rows are going to shape up).

Here is a brief video showing the seeder in action:

Jang Clean Seeder

Jang in action

Spring 2010 Update

Annabel — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 02:41:53 +0000

On April 2nd, the temperature reached 87 degrees, a new record. Time to get out in the dirt and start planting! Since this is our first year growing for market, we’ve scaled our growing capacity quite a bit and purchased tools to make the transition a bit easier. This post outlines what we are doing to prepare the beds for planting. This is a bit of a follow on to our post last year about how to prepare an urban lot for planting.

Plow under the cover crop

We really wanted to get more mileage out of the alfalfa we planted last August. However, we are also eager to get some seeds in the ground. So, we used the Grillo 107-d with the Berta rotary plow attachment (“Bertha”) to plow under the cover crop. This will add to the organic material in the soil, but we don’t think we gained much of the nitrogen fixing benefits of the alfalfa since it wasn’t in the ground long enough.

Prep the beds

Next, we prepared our beds according to the SPIN farming method. First, we had to pull some more rocks out of our soil (so many rocks!). Due to the layout of our plot and width of our tiller, we are using 25″ x 30′ beds rather than the 24″ x 25′ recommended by SPIN. We added about 24 cubic feet (or about 4 wheelbarrows full) of compost to each 30′ bed. Then we switched out the rotary plow implement with the Grillo rototiller attachment and tilled the compost into the soil. We set the tiller at a depth of about 4″. This mixes the organic matter into the bed.

Plant the beds

Once the compost has been added, we are now ready to plant! We ran tests with our Jang Seeder to determine the spacing and the wheels to use for each crop (will do a separate post with pics for this). We planted 5 beds as follows:

Bed 1: carrots x 3 rows
Bed 2: onions x 7 rows
Bed 3: arugula x 6 rows
Bed 4: romaine lettuce x 6 rows
Bed 5: radishes x 6 rows

Will post an update once we see germination! Happy Spring and enjoy working the soil….

Planting alfalfa

Annabel — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 01:51:07 +0000

Tonight we planted alfalfa. This is a cover crop that has the following benefits:

nitrogen fixer
puts down a long tap root and helps break up the soil
can be mowed and put in the compost for on-farm organic matter
protects soil through the winter; diminishes weed production

We used a Jang Seeder purchased at Mechanical Transplanter Company in Michigan (super nice people). They sold me a number of planting wheels for $20.00 a piece to accommodate different seed sizes. We will probably need more, and this is an extra cost I had not calculated. I’m hoping the extra money this seeder costs (by comparison the popular Earthway seeder costs about $150) will pay for itself in time savings and seed cost. This was our first time using a seeder and I have to say I’m pretty happy with the results. Sorry for the poor picture quality…forgot the camera.

We used the Y-24 planting wheel to put down 1-3 seeds every 2 inches and we attempted to make rows about 2 inches apart. In the end we only used about 1/2 pound of seeds for 2000 sq. ft. So we are going to seed it again at that same rate to put down about 1/2 lbs per 1000 sq. ft. per Johnny’s Seeds. Nice job of checking the application rate AFTER we had planted.

Jang Seeder Model JP-1, 1-Row Hand Seeder