So today we're out here at the Hoss sustainable living center working in our
demonstration garden. This garden is a part of our little area here at the
Sunbelt Expo which is a show we have here in South Georgia every year it's a
big Agricultural Show and we put on this little demonstration garden and have
exhibits as a way to show people how they can grow their own food the
different varieties they can grow and the different techniques they can use to
grow their food so this morning I want to show you how we can take the Hoss
wheel hoe and the Hoss garden seeder and we can make these beautiful really
productive elevated greens beds like you see here these greens beds here were
planted about two weeks ago these three here we have three different varieties
and today we're going to plant three more beds that way we can kind of show
the progression of the growth to show the different stages of succession so
the market farmer standard for these types of greens beds is usually 30
inches we put these we made two foot beds here just for demonstration
purposes it worked out better for the spacing of our plot so you can certainly
grow these closer together and grow these beds wider depending on what
you're going to be using to harvest them or how you going to harvest them but for
our purposes here the two foot beds work good visually and for us to be able to
get in there and work in the beds so we're going to use the wheel hoe here
with one plow blade to make our elevated beds to plant these greens on now these
beds like I said are gonna be 2 foot wide but you could easily make them 30
inches wide or even 3 foot wide so we have our double wheel hoe here you
could easily do this with a single wheel hoe as well and we have one plow blade
on here this is the right plow blade so it's going to be throwing dirt to the
right so we'll mark off where our beds are going to be and we'll throw dirt to
the middle then we'll rake that smooth and add some compost and then our beds
should be ready to go
all right so we've got our beds laid off and we got them shaped we've got them
composted and now it's time to plant them we got our seeder here we took our
number one plate and we drilled out every other hole so we have 16 holes in
here which gives us just a hair over 1 inch spacing which would be good and
tight for these beds we want to plant them really intensively we did drill out
the hole size just a hair some of these green mixes can vary a little bit in the
size of seed in them just so just to be safe we drilled out the holes a little
bit we'll plant thick and it'll look really nice we've got three varieties
we're planting today we're planting the Elegance mix the Ovation mix and then
the premium greens mix from Johnny's and all these are really nice greens mixes
we planted some of them before and we really like them
so on my seeder here I have the kickstand here tied up so I could plant
wheel-to-wheel so what we'll do is we'll start on the side of one of these beds
we'll walk to the side of the seeder and we'll plant one line and the wheel will
kind of let us know where we've been and then we'll go right beside that and
plant right beside that next wheel pass with these beds here these 2 foot beds
usually anywhere from 6 to 8 passes will cover the bed we're not worried about
getting too much seed on them we're just going to make sure we cover them and get
them planted good
all right so we got these three beds planted you saw that was pretty quick
and easy it doesn't take long to build the beds and with a garden seeder it
doesn't take very long to plant them either we set the depth on on the garden
seeder at about a quarter inch deep and then because it's made out of steel and
it's got good weight to it those rear wheels do a really good job
of compacting and pressing that seed down the seed bed so
we get really good seed to soil contact which means really good germination one
thing that's important once planting these types of greens here is they kind
of need to be hand watered in to get really good germination so we'll hand
water these with our DRAM wand about twice a day until they come up and get
good and established as you can see from this plot here you can grow a ton of
these greens on a little plot so it's a really productive crop a crop that can
be cut multiple times the date to maturity is about 21 days so these over
here that we just planted a few weeks ago are almost ready for their first
cutting these guys here should be ready just about time for the Sunbelt Expo so
come see us here in Moultrie at the Sunbelt Expo October 17th through the
19th we'll be here and we hope to see you here as well