Germination Chamber and Succession Planting Workshop

Presented by Dan Zimmerli
Farmer and owner, Cedar Crate Farm
in partnership with SFA and Region Nine Development Commission

A germination chamber is a controlled environment used to optimize seed germination and can play a vital role on small farms in increasing your germination rate, reducing the stress of starting seeds, and will improve overall profitability. In this workshop, SFA’s Dan Zimmerli will provide an overview of the germination chamber used on his farm and provide information on how to construct your own. Topics we will cover will include:

• What is a germination chamber and how is it used?

• Why a germination chamber is so important for our farm.

• Why a germination chamber is better than heat mats and humidity domes.

• Which crops work the best for germination chambers.

• Which crops don’t work well in germination chambers.

• How to construct a germination chamber with readily available parts.

• The optimal settings for a germination chamber.

Once we’ve gone over all the details on a germination chamber we’ll move on to talking about succession planting and how succession planting combined with a germination chamber can create consistency on your farm that will drive profitability. Succession planting is having multiple plantings of crops throughout the season spaced out in a way that enables you to offer that crop for as much of the season as possible. Consistency is a key to profitability especially for direct to consumer farms. In the succession planting portion of the workshop we’ll cover the following topics:

• What is succession planting?

• Why is succession planting important/how does it drive farm profitability?

• Tools to get started with succession planting.

• How to implement your crop plan during the season.

• What data should you collect to improve your plan?

• Putting it all together into a full crop plan.

Registration requested, walkups welcome.

SFA staff and volunteers occasionally take photos during our workshops, cafe chats and field days for promotional purposes and to use as documentation of events to share with our funders.  If you do not wish to be photographed, please let our event host know — we’ll make every effort to make sure you are not photographed.