New drill owner here. So far i've checked seed rate calibration on one seed and the results were real close to the chart. My question is with some of these highly diverse mixtures, what part of the chart would you use as as a starting point? I'm trying to get close on the first go round so it doesn't take multiple rounds of calibration and weighing to get close enough.
I have albert lea's summer max which probably wont even get planted this year but as an example, what part of a chart would you reference for a starting point?
https://alseed.com/product/summermax-cc6/
I have the Land Pride 606NT Wind Gypsy so this may be different than what you have but the basics are going to be the same.
I like to mix my own seed for a number of reasons but probably primarily because I have both a large seed box and a small seed box on my drill and I can get the most accurate planting, and planting at the correct depths by drilling my large seed from one box and small seed from the small box. This is the seed I used to mix up my Summer Cover Crop blend.
I like to use a diverse blend of seed from each of the 4 major categories so I get the best interaction for healthy soil and nutrient building. You may note that this blend is very similar to the Green Cover Seed - Summer Release (now Browse Release) and also the Vitalize Seed Co - Nitro Boost mix. I used the SmartMix Calculator tool on the Green Cover Seed website to determine the proper rates for each different seed in my mix.
When it came time to plant I took notes to determine what seed was going into which box and arrived at the goal for each box to get my desired rate of 41#/acre - 5#/acre in the small box and 36#/acre in the large seed box
Then I got out my digital scales and small pails and started weighing and mixing the seed.
This is what the 8 different large seeds looked like when I mixed them together...
First I calibrated the seed from the small seed box. I block off 2/3 of the box and just put seed in one end of the box to catch seed from 3 of my 9 tubes and average that weight per tube
After calibrating the small seed box I used the shop vac to remove all of the small seed and then dumped some of the large seed mix into the drill (blocking off 6 of the 9 tubes) and calibrated for the large seed box...
These are my notes/worksheet for the small seed box. I screwed up in moving the setting from 30 to 25 (went from 30 to 20 instead) or I would have had it right on the 3rd try, but lever setting #25 gave me 5.15#/acre...
For a starting point I look at my notes from previous mixes I have planted and I get a good idea of where I should be based upon what rate I will be planting at. Last year I drilled a different Fall Cover Crop at 68#/acre using setting #41 so, since I only wanted to plant at 36#/acre with this mix I cranked it down to setting #27 to start with. That was a pretty good guess as that setting gave me 35.07#/acre. I bumped it up to #28 and came in right at 36.27#/acre which I figured was close enough...
So I locked in those settings, filled both boxes with seed and went out and planted.
I will calibrate my drill again 2 more times this year for other things I will be planting. It really is no big deal calibrating a drill. I do this every year and once you have done it a couple of times it really is easy as pie. Just make sure you keep good notes to refer to in the future. This has been the key for making calibration easy for me. I don't have to reinvent the wheel with every new mix I come up with. Truthfully, I can't remember the last time I looked at the Seed Rate Chart that came with my drill but I know it has been probably at least 4-5 years ago.