A very big expense for us every year is the cost of having seeds sown and grown into little starts for transplanting.  This year we will spend about $40,000 just to get seeds started and that doesn't include the cost of the seeds.  One way to bring this expense down is to mix seeds together before sending them off to Headstart for propagation.  When we jump from 1000 seeds to 5000 the cost of sowing goes from $100 per 1000 to $50 per 1000. A very significant savings. Nigel has taken to mixing things up. For example, with our lettuces, the rows are a mix of all the lettuce varieties we grow. This year, Nigel has added another time saving (therefore money saving) trick to the field mixing and that is switching crops every other row in a bed.  In this picture you can see beds that are a row of cabbage followed by a row of fennel, then repeating.  This was set up so that when we harvest using the harvesting rig, we can have two guys picking cabbage and one guy picking fennel.  That ratio works out just about right.  The fennel is gorgeous and the cabbage plants are huge and healthy looking. A great cabbage season looks promising!