Painting by the artist Oleksiy Shekshuuev
Ukraine is on the mind as with everyone. Our Sunflowers for Ukraine initiative is taking off through Rotary. I met with the farmer Doug Bruckner from Collingullie on Tuesday Doug is donating half a tonne of sunflower seeds to my Rotary Club Coolamon. We are looking at the logistics and so far it is looking very feasible. Half a tonne of sunflower seeds! Anyone guess how many seeds that is? This is one way of packaging and 80 seeds in the bag works well, use a small scoop. The bag is about 100mm x 70mm they can be bought online in bulk at 2 cents each.
Here is the link that will take you to the bags:
The logistics for this initiative can be downloaded here:
Logistics
We have the art work for the cards that go in the bags if you need to print you own. Otherwise Quick print in Wagga Wagga can print them for you.
We have plenty of seeds available for mailing or collection from Ganmain. The bags and the cards are easy to produce. It is the filling of the bags that takes time and manpower. My estimate is that 10 good people can fill 100 bags with the card to the bag with say 40 seeds into each bag within an hour. That is 1,000 bags of seeds. Which is a good result all round. We have been approcahed by our Coolamon Central School to help fill the bags.
Now the answer to how many seeds in one kilogram:
I have counted the seeds from one sunflower which weighed 93 grams and I got 1,557 seeds. So 1kg of seeds would then yield 16,000 seeds and 500kgs gives us 8 million seeds enough to fill 200,000+ bags with 40 seeds per bag.
Once the seeds are harvested we will collect the seeds from Doug Bruckner of the Gnadbro Pastoral Company and they will be in one bulk bag weighing 500kgs. We will then package them into 1 kg bags enough to make up say 200 bags with 80 seeds per bag. NB the Yates seeds package had 30 seeds in it and cost $4 per packet so we can double the yield if we halve the number of seeds per bag!
Now we believe that the best way to obtain donations is by displaying teh seeds and the project in a display/donations box similar to this mock up we are using at the moment. They will cost $4.00 each plus postage.
My contact details are in the flyer below:
UPDATE ON THE SUNFLOWER SEEDS
The sunflower seeds are in the bin! Some photos from this morning’s harvest. Thanks so much Doug Bruckner you are a champion. We look forward to collecting your generous donation for Ukraine.
The seeds are now in Ganmain ready for posting. Sunflower seeds for Ukraine update. Yesterday one of our Coolamon Rotary members Garth Perkin and I went out to The Rock to collect the seeds. Doug Bruckner who donated the seeds was there to load us with as many seeds as we needed. Based on the 10 kgs. I got last week, we only loaded what we needed. The bag was heavy, the two of us could not lift it. So we are up and away and next week I will send seeds out to those who have asked for them. Thanks again to Doug Bruckner of Gnadbro Pastoral.
