Chris at Fanfield Farm has recently taken delivery of the Paper Pot Transplanter and is excited to find out just how much time he can save with the investment on this tool… He put a lot of research into it beforehand though and so we asked him to share this with us in this blog post…
Before I bought the transplanter I wanted to work out the time that could be saved and as always I headed to the brilliant growing community on instagram. I spoke to Jacks Veg in Kent who has been using and documenting data and was happy to share some of the information.
Jack told me that on average a seed tray takes around 15 mins to seed if done completely from hand on it’s own, with the drop seeder that you can get in the Paper Pot Transplanter starter kit, that time is reduced to 3 minutes.
Then when it comes to actual transplanting, planting out a bed takes around an hour by hand, and with the transplanter that is reduced to 15 minutes.
Ok, so that’s 12 minutes saved seeding and 45 minutes saved transplanting… sounds ok doesn’t it… But the real power is when you look at how often that can be used.
Let’s take Beetroot as an example, at Fanfield Farm this year we are planting 24 successions of Beets through this coming season and each succession is 2x trays to seed.
The time breakdown by hand:
- 15 minutes per tray, 2 trays per succession, 24 successions = 720 minutes
- 60 minutes per bed transplanted, 24 beds succession = 1440 minutes
Now with the Paper Pot Starter Kit:
- 3 minutes per tray, 2 trays per succession, 24 successions = 144 minutes
- 15 minutes per bed, 24 successions = 360 minutes.
By Hand = 36 hours, with the Paper Pot Kit = 8.4 hours.
THAT IS OVER 27 HOURS SAVED ON JUST ONE CROP!!
When you look at this in terms of cost, take the national living wage, that is £270 worth of labour saved on just one crop in one year. I’m going to be using this on 5 crops this year and so will see a return on the investment of the Paper Pot transplanter starter kit in just one year. Plus with good maintenance and care it will last for a long long time.
I am also looking forward to less time on my hands and knees, being 6ft2 anything I can do to save my back will help me keep market gardening for a lot longer in life. Working on this I was sold and invested in the Paper Pot, I know it will take some time to get used to using it and then teaching staff these methods will be something that will take perfecting.. but in the long run I am so excited to put it into our operations on the market garden.
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>>Check out the Paper Pot Transplanter Starter Kit By Clicking Here.<<