Earthway Seeder: A Necessary Tool for Starting Your Market Garden

I wrote in my CSA piece that I only want to grow the “easy vegetables” to get started. What did I mean by that?

I meant basically anything that 1) grows fast, 2) doesn’t have a huge amount of pest problems and 3) can be planted via seeder.

At the end of last season, I bought from Johnny’s Seeds in Maine an Earthway Seeder:

These things are not your best seeder option, but at a little over $100, it’s much more affordable than the alternatives. Basically you pop your seeds into the chamber, the action of the front wheel is transferred to a disc inside the chamber that turns and distributes your seeds through the bottom.

Personally, I don’t think the lightweight aluminum frame gives you an advantage. I’d rather have a seeder that’s a bit heavier, but to get started, this is pretty much the universally-accepted option.

Sure, you can do without it (seeding by hand), but it’s “part of my plan” to pretty much only plant crops that I can seed directly via this thing for my main production system. It means that I can prep and plant a garden bed in a few minutes, and everything grows directly in the soil. I won’t really be messing around with starting a lot of things ahead of time indoors or in a greenhouse (I mean, I will a little, but not for my cash crops — just things for our personal use), and I won’t have to do any major transplanting of seedlings, or play around with polytunnels, etc.

So that’s part of what I mean by the “easy ones” as far as vegetables go. I’m going to have enough work to do as it is getting things up and going, so why break my brain trying to grow every possible vegetable under the sun?

Also, focusing on direct-seeded plants that are fast growing builds in a certain “forgiveness” element into my production system. That is, if I have a crop that fails for whatever reason, I didn’t just waste 180 growing days (I only realistically have 150 anyway) in my limited growing space locked into one plant that’s going to take all season to grow. Instead, if something doesn’t work, I can strip it out, and replant without skipping a beat, and without locking up a garden bed for something that finally, by the end of the season, didn’t produce that well anyway.

I’m looking at you, cabbages, when I say this. I love kale and I love red cabbage (both of which I might grow a little of for personal use still), but I’ve seen just how much effort and time the cabbages took at my last job, and how poorly they performed. Bt was applied copiously (still allowed under an organic regime, though maybe it shouldn’t be, based on the toxic labeling on the container…), but those little worms/butterflies still ravaged it anyway. So why give myself the stress of growing it anyway?

Related: an interesting comparison of the Earthway seeder with the Jang and another Brazilian one I’ve never seen before within a no-till context:

The Earthway doesn’t really succeed when used this way, as its outside of its design parameters. But I’m 99% sure that if I run through first with my long-handled Korean-style Ho Mi digger from Lee Valley first to establish my seeding paths, and remove a little debris (a la Ruth Stout), that the Earthway can be effectively used in this context.