Seed ball failures

I made seasame seed balls using white ant hill soil and brodcasted them after cutting and keeping the grass aside and then flooded the field which takes around 2 hours of time. I had used around 0.5Kgs of seeds for the area of around 0.15 acres. But I could see only a few seeds germinated. Wanted to find the reason and could see that since seed balls were having very thin coating of soil, after flooding, most of the coating would have gone and seeds would have been eaten by ants.I found out this by putting seedballs in a glass of water for 1.5 hours and seeds just came out. Some learnings..

1. So it looks like, if flooding is used with seed balls, then it is best to flood first then sow the seed balls towards the end, so they don't remain in water for long.

2. Also for various reasons, the germination will be bad, so use more seeds, may be for this area, I can use around 1.5Kgs of seeds.

3. Another important improvement can be using some other clay which sticks to seeds better, so that seeds are not exposed that easily on watering.

18-June-2019

For paddy, this time made big seed balls with compost and cowdung so that they get a good boost on germination. This looks to be fine, can see that lot of seeds germinated from seedballs. Basically with rain, seed does not get exposed easily and not eaten by insects or birds. It looks like for seedballs to be successful, it has be reasonably bigger size.