Is There a Gadget to Help Plant Seeds One at a Time?
Not all plant seeds are alike. Some, like sunflower, pea and pumpkin seeds, are large and easy to handle during planting. Others, like beet, lettuce and carrot seeds, are tiny, and it's not always easy to achieve the correct planting depth or proper spacing between them. A hand seeder not only simplifies the process but speeds it up as well, making it a boon for anyone with a large garden.
What a garden seeder does depends on what it is being used for and the size of the planting area, with models available for different planting needs. Broadcast seeders, which are generally used to seed lawns, spread lots of seeds at once across a large area, while row seeders dispense a single seed at a time. Other seeders used commercially include machines designed to quickly seed large trays destined for nursery and greenhouse mass seedling production. In the home garden, smaller handheld or push-type seeders make quick work of sowing long garden rows and ensure that seeds of all sizes are planted at the correct depth and correct spacing.
Simple inexpensive handheld seeder models, such as the plunger or dial sower, leave the planting distance up to you and just dispense the seeds where and how deeply you want them. The plunger seeder looks like a syringe and has a round tab at the end that you depress to release the seed from the opposite end. Dial sowers store the seeds inside a circular rotating transparent hopper that adjusts to the size of the seed and ejects it through a chute on the bottom. Another inexpensive seeder is essentially a small, scooplike device that uses vibration to dispense seeds.
Stab-style planters are composed of a tube and seed box that releases two or three seeds at a time and drops them into the soil. The device's handles are pulled apart as it is inserted into the ground. Once the seeds have been deposited, the handles are pulled back together again and the planter pulled out.
Wheeled Seed Planters
Larger push-type seeders are equipped with a hopper that holds the seed, a feeder that adjusts to seed size, a device that measures the soil depth and a gauge that can be set to release the seed at the correct spacing. Wheeled seeders are typically mounted on a frame supporting a seed hopper and come with adjustable plates that monitor seed size, soil depth and dispensing rate.
The U.S. Forest Service routinely uses stick planters in its reforestation programs. There are several variations on these planters. The Hand Jab planter is manually pushed into the soil, which is sometimes difficult to penetrate in forests and weedy fields, and individual seeds dropped into the tube are released by pushing the device to one side, which opens the bit. The Seed Stick is mounted on long handle that passes through a hopper positioned close to the ground. A seed is released by a spring-mounted ram into a tube and then is planted at the proper depth as the stick's end is pushed into the soil. The Seed Stick features different sizes of rams designed to accommodate different seed sizes.
Rachel Lovejoy has been writing professionally since 1990 and currently writes a weekly column entitled "From the Urban Wilderness" for the Journal Tribune in Biddeford, Maine, as well as short novellas for Amazon Kindle. Lovejoy graduated from the University of Southern Maine in 1996 with a Bachelor of Arts in English.