So...as mentioned in the last post, we're planning to sell at a few garlic festivals next year. Because of that we're going to more than double the amount we're planting this year to roughly 10,000 head. We planted about 3,800 this past year and our crooked little rows were inefficient for weeding and not space effective. We had 2 garlic plants per row and a spacing of 5" between plants. The distance width wise was eyeballed and was frankly all over the place. The optimal spacing for garlic is 4-6", but I recently read a trial where 6" did perform the best of all spacings.

So...how do I get a perfectly spaced planting of garlic without spending a fortune on a transplanter?

Enter the rolling dibbler. The University of Wisconsin has published a how-to guide for building one of these. The picture to the left is from their website.
credit: University of Wisconsin Healthy Farmers,Healthy Profits Project, November, 2000; Third Edition

In addition to this Paul Betz wrote up an article in an issue of the Seed Bin from High Mowing Seeds. If you follow the link, you can see that his version is made almost exclusively of wood and is quite a bit smaller.

OK...Step 1. I went to gather up all of the materials at the local hardware/plumbing outlets. Everything was readily available except for the 12" PVC for the drum. I was told I could buy a 20' section for $155. Um...no. Since I need just a little more than 2' for this one drum it'd be a huge waste for me.

This put me back to the drawing board and made me realize that there were inherent advantages to both designs. The removable handle on the U of W design would come in very handy if I build more than one drum (which is likely). The Paul Betz design allows me to make the drum any size to accomodate exact spacings.

Like his design, I'm going with a regular dodecagon or twelve sided design. Since my spacing is 6" I need some multiple of that for the circumference of my roller. I'm settling on 36". Now that I have my circumference, I use Circumference / π = diameter to get the total diameter of my roller. In this case, the answer is 11.46" which I promptly round up to 11.5". I'm not going to mess around with hundredths. This is the point where you can't forget that those 1x3's are going to add thickness as well. I subtract .75" (yes, a 1x3 is .75" thick and 2.5" wide) and see that the diameter of my plywood ends need to be 10.75". The beauty of this approach is that you can get exactly the spacing you want. With the PVC pipe method, you're tied to spacings that aren't quite on the money. I anticipate that I'll likely build a few of these with different spacings for different crops, so having the ability to get the exact spacings is a boon.

As I see it, figuring all of this out is the toughest part of the process, I'm keeping all of my other parts in line with the U of W guide (some hardware notwithstanding...more on that in a later installment). At this point I had to figure out how to make a regular dodecagon. I used that wikipedia link and (more or less) followed the instructions. To make your life easier, you can click on the picture to the left and print out your own template. This image is a 10.75" dodecagon. If you don't have a printer that can handle 11x17" you'll have to print out 2 and tape them together.

OK...that's it for now. I'm going to start the build Wednesday night and will post updates with pictures as it goes along.