How to Set Your Drill for Milpa Seed Mixes
Learn how to calibrate your grain drill for diverse milpa seed mixes with large seeds like squash and small seeds like turnips and collards. We walk you through seeding depth, drill settings, and a simple two-pass method that lets you adjust mid-planting instead of guessing.
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0:00 For the people that do have a drill to put the milpa seed in the ground, which is great, that's the best way to do it. We often get questions about how do I calibrate or how do I set my drill and
0:11 They can be a challenge with these highly diverse mixes where I've got larger seeded things like squash and we've got small seeded things like the turnips and collards and mustard.
0:21 It's a little bit of an art form, but we've done this across hundreds of thousands of acres with mixes that farmers are planting on a large scale.
0:30 Maybe not quite as diverse as the milpa mix but certainly with just as diverse of seed sizes and so we know this can work.
0:40 First of all for seeding depth you're
0:42 Going to want to see this three quarters to an inch deep. It's going to be a little deeper than what some of the small seeds would like, maybe not quite as deep as some of the large seeds would.
0:51 Want but that's going to be a good average if you shoot for around three quarters of an inch. You're going to get pretty good emergence with that.
1:00 As far as setting the drill, you know it depends on your drill. There's lots of different drills, different ways of setting it. You're probably going to have to kind of...
1:19 That's kind of in the middle of it. It's heavier than the light stuff and it's lighter than the heavy stuff, and so it's kind of a good average place to start. The best thing to do you're...
1:29 Likely going to be doing this milpa on a relatively small area so I would cut my seating rate in half and then plan on drilling everything twice and if you do that then the first time you go across.
1:41 You can look to see how close did I come to getting half my seed used up and then you can adjust your rate up or down to drill the second time across then you can take two different angles again if
1:51 You're only doing a couple of acres, it's not going to take you that long to do it, but that way you don't get halfway through and figure out you've run out of all your seed or get all the way done and figure out that you've hardly used any of your seed. So just shoot for a half seeding rate and then plant it twice and it gives you the opportunity to make that adjustment halfway through the planning process.