Back to: Outplanting
The act of outplanting—actually unspooling seed string onto your growlines—is a generally pretty quick and straightforward task. However, all of the surrounding activities—communicating with your hatchery, watching the forecast for a weather window, making sure you have all of your gear properly assembled and deployed—takes time and coordination, especially in your first season.
Because your kelp seed is particularly vulnerable during the short window of time when it leaves the hatchery and is transferred to your farm site, you’ll want to ensure that you have everything prepared in advance and choose optimal weather conditions for outplanting.
Outplanting during unfavorable conditions or prolonging the period the kelp seed is out of the water during its transfer to the farm can cause suboptimal growth of your crop.
Outplanting is the act of transferring juvenile kelp seed, grown in a hatchery, to its permanent home on the growlines of your farm. This is typically done by passing the growline through the center of a PVC seed spool and fastening the seed string to the growline. Then, using a small skiff or boat to maneuver, the seedstring is gently unwound from the spool directly onto the growline.
Sometimes outplanting is also referred to as “seeding.” This makes sense as it’s the act of placing your kelp seed in the water, just as a terrestrial farmer would plant their seeds in the ground. However, at GreenWave, we call this step outplanting to differentiate from the hatchery process of seeding spools of twine. During the early stages of hatchery culture, thousands of microscopic zoospores are released from the mature sorus tissue of parent kelp and settle on the tightly wrapped twine. We refer to this hatchery process as seeding, and the process of ultimately transferring that seed to a growline in the ocean as outplanting. Learn more about the hatchery process here.