Scott Sawyer showed up Sept 28 with the plants, right on schedule.  We started planting the next day using the new home-made water wheel planter I built.  I ran the drip pretty heavily to try to get some moisture in the beds.  Back on the 5th of Sept. I seeded 50 lbs of rye in the field, but very little of that had germinated due to lack of rain.  It took us 4 days to plant one acre due to the difficulty in rounding up 3 people at a time to operate the planter.  A few problems arose that may cause trouble later.  The holes were too big and deep leaving too much airspace around the plugs.  I overhead watered a good bit after planting hoping the soil would fill in around the plugs, but that didn't happen.  My plumbing system to feed water to the wheels was very level sensitive and one wheel tended to get most of the water, leaving the other side dry.  That will have to fixed next time.  The tractor (New Holland TT060) was too fast even in low gear at idle for a 2 person water wheel crew to keep up.  We didn't have time to spend seating the plants or heeling them in at all.  We'll have to follow up later with that.  I overwet some of the beds and the wheels crushed the soil down too much.  My floating wheel design didn't hav enough movement to accomodate the variation in bed heights and at times the full weight of the planter was bearing down on the wheels.  Another item to fix.

Dumb lesson learned:  The plant spacing is not exactly the wheel circumference divided by the number of spikes.  It is somewhat lengthier due to the additional radius of the spikes.  And the longer the spikes and smaller the wheel, the more pronounced that lengthening effect is.