For hard sod, the pointed end might work better. Maybe poke (or stomp) it in, and move to one side to open the hole so the seed has some place to go. I’d be afraid the point would just cut a half-circle slit in the soil, and leave the seed on top.
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Sean,
Do like @tcholton717 . Just make a furrow and drop seeds in. Cover lightly and you are done.
I can see that hollow “planter stick” pointy end plugging up with soil every time you stick it in the ground. I have used a dibble stick, which is just a pointy stick with some kind of handle. Furrow with a hoe is quicker and easier.
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I think that WILL happen too. Which is what made me pause. 
This is too hard. It is a flat area about .1-.2 acres where the county shaved off a hill, so it is basically a hardpan clay subsoil, with rocks in it that was also packed down because I think they rolled it with a road packer roller. It has been sitting for like 50 years like this, but it is still rock hard. I am not going to try and furrow by hand. a disk on the back of a tractor would work, but the tractor with the 3pt to attach the implement needs to be fixed. And if that worked, i could till the whole thing.
There is a planter stick that has a pointed end, offset from the tube, kind of like a ‘h’. It would work. But I am starting to think this is going to take way too much time for what it is, and broadcasting radish seed is going to be more worthy of my time, and should loosen up the soil moving forward.
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If you can find a source of rotting hay or other mulch, you might try covering the area and irrigating it once in a while. Thin some spots and plant your radishes and sunflowers. Come to think of it, this isn’t that different from your original plan. The mulch would hold the moisture, and the mown grass would add some nitrogen. Might speed things up a little bit.
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It will get dead grass blown back on it by the mower. I honestly don’t anticipate anything growing well on it so I don’t want to put a lot of time into it.
Well if it’s not so hard packed that it can be tilled and if it peculates reasonably, then I would dig foot wide trenches about 18 inches deep and fill them with imported soil. Leaf mold from the woods, bagged compost, wood ash and bio-char. The mix I"m using in my tomatoes planting holes is 6 gallons of last years container mix, 2 gallons of peat moss, one gallon of wood ash and one gallon of bio-char that is charged with last years hydroponic solution. I throw in a hand full of bone meal before I put the plant in and then a hand full of worm castings around the plant and then fill the rest of the hole with the mix I described. After planting I water it them with the basic JADAM liquid fertilizer which is just weed and plant cuttings in a garbage can of water and a couple gallon of urine per 25 gallons of water. Sits in the sun and cooks. First year I’ve tried this as opposed to some kind of store bought water soluble fertilizer. Mostly for nitrogen. The P and K comes from the bone meal and wood ash. This whole garden area was pretty much pure sand when I started it 15 years ago. It’s better now.
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I’ll put it this way, my dad broke the single bottom plow on the Allis C trying to test out the plow.
IThe soil has moved so little, the plow furrows are still there. The tractor with the 3pt that can run the tiller needs something done to the transmission. That is a project that has like 20 in front of it.
I could use the walk behind, but that will take a while.
The plan is to plant something that can grow to try and go deep to get it loosened up and add organic matter. Then maybe it will be easier to hit with a tiller.
I need to follow that with bacteria, fungi, nematodes, etc because that is lacking on the property as a whole.
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Sounds like planting seeds will be the frosting on a cake that is not yet ready for the oven. You will want to improve the soil with compost and char before direct planting or start using raised beds with topsoil from somewhere else. A smaller plot with proper soil will be much more productive and satisfying. The rest of the plot you can top dress with some kind of mulch to get it hydrating, softening, ready for later. Maybe plant some green"manure" nitrogen fixing plants like white clover. Bees will thank you!
Edit: I see my advice is much like the above. Start with the most promising section of the plot and work on the rest as time allows. 
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Now that was a great practical comment advise MikeR.
You can near instantly raised bed garden. Just takes a money commitment.
You can soils improve the extremes of high sand to high clay.
I/we, have done the first for years, actually three generations. Still . . . sandy soil you’ll use a lot of water lost going down below your “improved” soil growing layer.
Ha! I grew up next to a long one mile by four mile clay bottoms lands. Seen tons of moneys and efforts done on that area.
Improve all you want and you’ll still have a stagnating clay layer below your “improved” growing bed soil layer.
Sure-sure. Ma’Nature does all the time convert volcanic sterile new-made and washed blown sands to growing lands. Taking hundreds to thousands of years of progressive types of plants to do this. She can even fill in and covert to meadows, bog lands sinks.
And yes, as active change-your-environments Man: you can shorten this down to a decade or two. With tons of effort and expenses. That will not feed your this year. Or the year after.
What matters most is what you do Now; this new northern hemisphere growing season to have foods grown for the follow-on 6-8 months of not growing.
Pots and raised beds. Bed sides and corners made up of what-ever. Cinder blocks. Old bricks. Broken out concrete sections. Old tires stacked.
Make up what you can afford to buy out good earth; and improved soils fill for. Two-three bags at a time every pay period.
Steve Unruh
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None of it is promising. The clover idea is kind of where I am going, but I don’t think it will grow. It isn’t going to be a garden area, so not worth putting much money into it.
However, after years of grass clippings the garden area soil DID improve considerably and actually can hold quite a bit of water now.
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I actually mowed over two small patches of it. but it has radish seed on it. We will see if it works. That only took an hour and a half. IF it works, I don’t have to mow it again all summer.
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Very nice! Builds teamwork, and looks like it’s a Deere.
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Today the last of my starts and seeds go into the soil. Pumpkin, winter squash and celery. I started my first trays the last week in January and have been steady at it since. Hard to imagine that this garden is about half as much as I used to plant. I really wanted to just play around with hydroponics and greenhouse growing, without all the crawling around on hands and knees but world events have forced me back into more conventional methods. I have a cyber buddy who used to do market gardening in three big hoop houses but retired from that. He claims that he could be food self sufficient in one of his 30 by 60 hoop structures in North Carolina and I have no reason to doubt it. I’m giving it a lot of thought.
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They can double or triple crop because of the longer growing season in NC, plus the additional time the hoop house gains you without heating, and then heating in NC is considerably easier.
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People who grow for a living are a far more skilled than I’ll ever be. If I lose a crop that’s just a bad year but if they do that’s no money to live on. I did make a suggestion to him that he adopted and it proved to be a difference maker. I had him run rows of PEX beneath his tomato beds and heat the soil with a propane fired water heater and circulating pump. It got him about a three week head start on his tomatoes and a better harvest. As long as the roots are warm the above ground growth can do fine at much lower temps. Same applies to many crops but tomatoes were one of his big money makers so it was worth the cost of the propane.
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My grandpa used to use electric heat strips. I think they were repurposed from keeping pipes from freezing in his small coldframe. Greenhouses do use pipes in or under the beds
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Just a little update from here.
We gave the Kratky growing method a shot this year, thanks to @tcholton717 for showing us the method and the tip of Houcho on the tube, so far (although we were a bit late this year due to the rebuild of the snowflattened hoophouse) we are pretty happy with the method. This year we are testing it out on a smaller scale with a jerryrigged system and it is by far more manageable in the terms of weeding, both physically and mentally, and we have the strongest tomatoplants since we started, if that is due to this system or other circumstances we don’t know but they look very healthy as well as the strawberries to the right on the pic, we have been cutting off the flowers on the strawberries ’til about a week ago to make the plants stronger and to flower more so no strawberries yet.
We also put in lettuce and other leafy greens a week back so can’t say much about those yet, also put in a few cauliflower plants and red beets to see how they grow in this.
I don’t really like to be dependent on buying in fertilizer for this passive hydroponic system but so far the plusses are way bigger than the minuses, hopefully that doesn’t change with the harvest both nutrientwise and tastewise.
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Do you buy artificial fertilizer, or what do you use?
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Is the green chair there so you can sit and watch things grow?
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