Te Weka is a unique conservation, land and residential estate under development in the Tuki Tuki Valley. One of the last permitted development areas in a location of outstanding natural beauty, getting the landscaping for the subdivision perfect is a must. That’s where Will Coltart and the SeedMaster 1000 come in.
“We’ve been using the SeedMaster 1000 for sowing berms” says Will. “It’s really useful for flatter areas and shallow gradients. We’re been sowing berms adjacent to roads, and some small faces, and it works great for them.”
Will uses the SeedMaster with a cellulose (paper) mulch, which is exactly what the machine was designed for. We did this to avoid the fancy add-ons that probably wouldn’t get used, allowing us to reduce the number of moving parts, and making the SeedMaster easier to unblock. After all, every hydroseeder can get blocked. It’s the ease of unblocking that eases frustrations when it does happen! Indeed, ease is a word that seems to crop up a lot in conversations when discussing the SeedMaster. Particularly when it comes to getting it into position…
“It’s very easy to get around on site. We can do smaller areas, we can do it ourselves, and there’s less liaising with external parties. For the scale of the developments, we’d normally use large hydro seeders but that takes a lot of organising and it’s difficult to fit them around other machinery. When you have a busy civil works site, full size mulching trucks have trouble squeezing past concrete trucks and others on site – you just can’t do it. The SeedMaster makes it easier to schedule everything.” explains Will.
He raises a great point. The SeedMaster is small and maneuverable, while the output is impressively large. For civil contractors and landscapers, the SeedMaster works around other machinery and there’s limited or no impact on the rest of the operation. It helps that SeedMaster is easy to use, too.
“All the valves are nice, large, and simple to turn. It’s a well designed piece of kit and it seems like some thought has been put into the ergonomics of it all, which is impressive to see.”
Will is right, again. Part of our design ethos is to make machines that anyone can use, and keep using. So the controls are intuitive and their upkeep is straightforward. Taking it a step further, there’s some thought that goes into exactly how the machine is used too, and this is where the SeedMaster really stands out. We added a working platform to make it easier to add the mulch mix. But it also makes it easier to do the actual job of mulching, as Will explains.
The walk-up platform means that as you are towing the SeedMaster down the road, one crew member can stand on the platform and spray as the driver creeps forward. With others, you park, run the hose all the way out, then start walking back, recoil the hose, move, and repeat again every 40 minutes. Not with the SeedMaster – and this is very clever.
