I’ve temporarily stepped into a now former coworker’s role - and I wanted to share what the work is like. She suddenly got ill and isn’t coming back. 

The vacuum seeder! This allows you to seed a 288 flat in no time! Whoever invented this thing was a genius. There’s different sizes of trays that fit into it, to accommodate the different sizes of seeds and flats.

To get to this step however, there’s lots of unglamorous things to do, that actually take up the bulk of the time:

• find correct soil
• find correct tray
• fill tray properly
• find correct seed
• find how much to seed
• find correct tags
• find marker to write the date on the tags so we know when they’re seeded
• grab and select proper seeding plate for seed vacuum

All seeded!

Seeds! These live in a fridge.

Ready to germinate! Don’t water too hard or you’ll destroy everything.

Seed mats. These heat the seeds to get them to germinate early in the season. If it’s really cold at night, even though this is a heated greenhouse, plastic will be pulled over the hoops for further protection and warmth.

I kinda skipped a few steps, but once the seeds have germinated, they’re removed from the heat mats. Once they form large enough roots, they’re transplanted into these trays (these are called 804s, it took years of lobbying to convince our boss to use these instead of the smaller 1204s). 

They are fed organic fish gut juice here at the farm, I feed them organic soybean juice at the garden center. They are both waste materials from other industries. The soybean juice smells delicious and doesn’t make people gag, unlike the fish.

This work is deeply satisfying. I’m planting 1000+ vegetable seeds a day, knowing that it will go on to feed people in the community. 

Honestly the best place to be in January and February around here is working in a heated greenhouse. July… not so much.