I like to put out a dish of water for snakes to drink from. They really appreciate it.
That’s awesome! What a great idea to help out the snakes!
If you only broadcast 70 brassica seeds, you are broadcasting several orders of magnitude too few. Broadcasting brassica seeds, try about a gallon (about 4 liters) of seed. This might sound like a lot, and it is many thousands. But, if you first save seeds from several plants that have gone to seed, you should not have much difficulty obtaining that quantity. If you broadcast that many seeds, you will get many plants that succeed. I do, every time. No supplemental water or special care. Often, not even preparing the soil. I have grown kale on compacted limestone gravel of a parking lot, and in cracks in cement.
I think the success rate is something like 10^-3 or even 10^-4. But those successful plants are very well adapted.
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Yeah, I’ve noticed something much the same. If I broadcast sow 1,000 brassica seeds, I will get about 100 seedlings, only one of which will survive to become a gigantic plant that in turn sets seeds the next year. But that one plant will be something awesome, and will give me more than 1,000 seeds. And in the meantime, all the little ones that sprouted but didn’t survive the whole winter acted as a nice groundcover for the ones that did, so . . . it’s okay! 
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