troubleshot

We did it!
The mechanical transplanter was finally put into play today!

By the end of the day it was laying down pretty impressive rows of seedlings. The first half+ of the day saw D, E and our ever-so-helpful volunteer troubleshooting, tweaking, thinking, solving and turning wrenches. For such a behemoth of an implement, it was/is certainly sensitive (when dropping the plant cells) to the smallest discrepancies in soil condition. Most of the time rocks (even smallish ones) were throwing it off. Curiously the spinach cells were giving it quite a bit of trouble as well. Perhaps it was a "too wet" cell that was sticky and deformed easily when dropped. Hmmm. More troubleshooting is necessary.

How it works:
3 people/transplanters sit in the 3 yellow chairs. 1 person drives the tractor at a snail's pace. As the implement's cross axle (not a pto shaft) is its drive train, forward speed dictates the rpms of the funnels into which the 3 people drop the individual plant cells. The 128cell flats, as you can see, are slid into upright brackets on manually spinning carousels. When sitting in a chair one has the 128 flat in front of them and between their knees a mechanically rotating cluster of 6 funnels. The person's job is pretty simple. Pull the cells from the flat and drop them individually (trying to make sure they remain upright) into the funnel. When a funnel passes the 12 o'clock position the spring-loaded bottom is opened and the cell drops down the chute. At the bottom of each assembly arm there are two horizontal skids/feet at the front of which is a miniature plow of sorts making an approximately 1 in. furrow. The cell drops between the feet and into the furrow. Due to the feet being offset from each other vertically, the soil is pushed back together behind them. Kinda tough to explain without seeing it.
What one is left with is super straight rows for cultivating and a thankful lower back.



There are drawbacks at this point (i.e., some cells are indiscriminately buried, we have to go back over the row manually and re-plant long lines of cells) as it's the first day and we don't have the thing truly dialed in yet. A few days' use and we'll be rockin evenly.

Pretty amazing machinery.

The rest of my day saw rototilling, running errands in the van, a nice lunch outside with E and our volunteer, removing another HUGE rock from W1 w/ D, greenhouse duties, setting up irrigation to "water in" today's transplants and yes, putting in the chickens.

A beautiful day by any measure.

Oh, and check out this rye/vetch in A field. I swear it was only an inch or two this past weekend.



Dig.