Transplanting Celery and the Optimal Potato Sort

Today's Activities:

• Spent the morning sorting potatoes. We managed to finish sorting all the potatoes in storage.


• Lunch.


• Transplanted celery seedlings. This is a cool process, and requires dexterity and lots patiences. The idea is this. Celery seeds apparently germinate better when they are together, rather than separated into individual cells in a tray. So, you "broadcast" (i.e. sprinkle, toss, spread, etc...) the celery seed into a tray of soil and let it sprout. Wait until it looks like so:
  
  
  Then you transplant a seedling from this mess of stuff into cells. That is, you grab a clump of seedling-laden soil, carefully break it apart so that you can extract individual sprouts, like this:
  
  
  
  
  And then place them each into a holes you've made with, say a pen, in the tray.
  
  
  
  
  Easy enough, but a bit painstaking. Something I couldn't imagine Annemarie putting up with. ;)
  
  We planted a total of 8 trays of celery, and 8 trays of chard (I think. I double check these numbers). For chard, one seed is placed directly into each cell.
  


• The rest of the day was spent doing random clean up jobs. Sweeping and tidying the farm store and another storage room; disposing of rotten potatoes leftover from the sorting process; etc..

A note about potato sorting. Now that it's over I think I can comment a little on the optimal sorting algorithm. Typically the goal is to sort the potatoes into three categories: those for sale, those for seeding, and those that are rubbish. A potato is deemed "saleable" if it is larger than, say, your average clementine. Otherwise it's probably best suited for seed.

In either case, if the potato is squishy, liquid, or smells like shit (I mean, actual shit), then it belongs in the rubbish pile. Also, sometimes we'd sort a crate of mixed white and red potatoes, in which case there's the additional task of separating the seed potatoes into reds and whites. Anyhow, the quickest and most entertaining sorting method I came up with goes something like this:

while (more potatoes to sort) {
  pick out smelly and rotten potatoes;
  pick out all saleable potatoes in plain view;

  while (more seed potatoes in plain view) {
    pick out all red seed potatoes;
    pick out all white seed potatoes;
  }

  dig around a bit to uncover more potatoes;
}

This method is miles ahead of some of the other ones I saw people practicing. In particular, here's a terrible method:

while (more potatoes to sort) {
  pick up a handful of potatoes;

  for each potato in the handful {
    put it in the appropriate bin;
  }

  dig around a bit to uncover more potatoes;
}

This method is far far too slow. You end up day dreaming about Tuscaloosa or something silly like that while your one hand travels to and from the other hand to the different bins. It's also, as you can tell, bottle-necked by the one-handedness of the sort, whereas the optimal method allows both hands to work independently (which, incidentally, is quite an awesome feeling).

One last thing. It turns out that there is a nasty potato-size grey area that makes high-speed categorisation decisions kinda nerve-racking. Typically what happens is that you consistently end up ignoring these ambiguous potatoes until they clutter your view so much that you're forced to deal with them in order to continue. Here's a version of the optimal potato sorting algorithm to work around this problem:

while (more potatoes to sort) {
  pick out smelly or rotten potatoes;
  pick out all saleable potatoes in plain view;

  while (more seed potatoes in plain view) {
    pick out all red seed potatoes;
    pick out all white seed potatoes;
  }

  push remaining potatoes into neighbour's sort area;

  dig around a bit to uncover more potatoes;
}