Why Baby Greens?
Baby greens are cuter! Kidding – but baby greens are sought after by customers in value-added items like salad kits. Anything that’s wanted by customers is therefore wanted by the growers who are selling to them.
From a grower’s perspective, baby greens can be planted at higher densities than full-sized greens and take less time to reach maturity. As a result, you can grow more baby greens and harvest more frequently. The economics of baby greens, theoretically, make sense.
Optimizing for Baby Greens
There are a few modifications to be made within a Growcer farm to optimize for baby greens, much of which is detailed in this baby spinach highlight.
Here’s a highlight of modifications made for baby green production:
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Changing the growing rafts
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Changing the substrate
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Determining optimal germination procedures
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Priming your substrate for seeding
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Adding an incubation phase
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“Floating” seedlings as is instead of transplanting them
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Harvesting in new ways
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Creating new Standard Operating Procedures (Maintenance is key!)
While it’s tantalizing to think you can grow more, harvest often, and cash in on baby greens, these modifications mean time.
For example, the labour required for seeding at a high density and how often you would have to seed (because remember, you harvest in 3 weeks instead of 5!), means that baby spinach production takes 16% more time on an annual basis compared to adult spinach.
So how do I save time growing baby greens? Let’s start with the first step: seeding.
Seeding baby greens
Seeding for baby spinach production is a laborious task. With 308 planting cells per block multiplied by 20 to 27 blocks per runway, that’s up to 8,316 seeds that need to be planted in a single cycle!
Plus, that’s only if you’re cultivating one runway – Growcer farms have 8 runways. (But you wouldn’t grow baby greens in your entire farm, because that’s like putting all your eggs in one basket. Save some of your runways for the adult plants.)
The worst way to seed baby greens is to attempt to pick up each seed one at a time and, with great coordination and accuracy, place it into a planting cell in a high density raft. This isn’t ideal. I’ve already forgotten if I’ve placed a seed into this planting cell. Wait, did I miss that one? The planting cells are all blending together now.
Growcer’s product team thought there must be a better way. And they were right.
Introducing: the drop seeder
The drop seeder is a tool that allows you to pre-load your seeds and “drop” them into an entire growing block all at once. Now you’re seeding 27 blocks instead of 8,316 seeds.
The goal of the drop seeder is to reduce the time it takes to seed (one of the most time consuming steps) and reduce the overall labour required to produce baby greens.
It’s important to note that this drop seeder is simply a prototype. Many prototypes were made and we’re still refining what is the best approach to save you the most time while seeding baby greens.
