I’ve been lucky enough to spend my spring in one of my favorite areas on the farm, the propagation greenhouses! As a greenhouse helper, I get to watch plants grow from seed and care for them until they are strong enough to be planted outside. All of the plant starts you see at our farmstand and market booth have been lovingly tended by our team for many months, and it makes us so happy to imagine them in your gardens.

We’ve got some nifty tools that help us speed up our greenhouses processes. New to the farm this year is the flat filler! While we used to spend many hours manually filling our plastic flats with soil, this machine does most of the work for us. We place empty flats on a conveyer belt and as they move though, soil is sprinkled in and excess is brushed off. It is a fun game to try and keep up with the flat filler, and we are busy feeding it flats, shoveling soil in, and stacking the filled flats. I’m grateful for this new tool, as the time it frees up can be better used for other, more intricate, greenhouse tasks.

After our flats are filled with soil, it is time for seeding! Seeding is my favorite process in the greenhouse, because I love seeing the variety of shapes and sizes of our seeds. My personal favorite is calendula, as they look like tiny sea creatures! We use a vacuum seeder for most of our plant starts and crops, and it’s amazing how speedy the process can be. This gadget features a vacuum connected to a tray with small holes aligning with the empty cells of a soil flat. We dump seeds in and tilt the tray until all holes are blocked by a seed, then tap off the excess. Then, the tray can be turned up-side-down over a soil flat and when you disconnect the vacuum, the seeds fall perfectly into the empty cells. There are lots of little tricks to mastering the vacuum seeder, and I find the whole process extremely satisfying.

I love the scale of Red Dog, as it allows me to enjoy both working with my hands and utilize help from some machinery to reduce the impact of farm work on my body. If you are curious about these tools and others, you can see videos of them in action on our Instagram and Facebook pages!

~Viv