Another (couple of) evening(s), a bit more progress. I'll do my best to blab as much as possible so that I don't run out of pictures to blab to.

OK so before I got to the point at left, I got a can of clear coat spray paint to give the pine a bit more protection than...nothing. So it looks like plain old pine, but will hopefully not rot right away.

Once I did that I attached all of the 2" l-brackets to the wood at the pre-marked places. I used 3/4" wood screws.

Next step was to cut all of that PVC. Per the instructions I found out yonder on the interwebs, I cut a bunch of 4" sections and then tried to cut the angles. After a few exploded pieces (always wear safety glasses...seriously) I finally figured out that it wasn't happening. I sucked it up and bought another 5' section of 2" PVC. This time I made a mark of the fence of my miter saw and alternated between 45º and 90º cuts. Once I had all 24 pieces of PVC, I set about marking them for drilling by setting them on on an L-bracket and marking it with a pencil.

Once I had them all drilled, I attached them with 1" 8-32 machine screws a locknut and a nut. In retrospect, I could have gone with a 1/2" machine screw.

One more note about those screws. The original instructions call for 1/4" screws. Their 2" brackets must have larger holes because the 1/4" ones didn't even come close to fitting. When you do this, just keep track of your hardware receipts. You may find that you need to make an extra trip to bring a bunch of it back.

I attached all of the dibbler points. I then slipped the T over the nipples that go into the flanges on the ends of the plywood. The next step with these T's will be to build the handle on them.

Beyond the T's are 5 pound weights and then an endcap.

I'm finding that a 6" nipple may be overkill and 5" would have done fine. I think it's, in part due to the fact that the weights illustrated in the original article are much wider.

In any case....ta-da! Here it is. It looks to me like some space buoy from a third rate sci-fi flick. I can't wait to try it out.
Next update will be the handle and also a revised parts list and rough cost assuming I can find all of the receipts.

Good morrow.....Paul

As promised, I'm continuing to document the building of my dibbler drum.

• Tonight, I cut out the plywood ends using the template that I posted in the last post. I used a table saw for the rough plywood cuts and a jigsaw to make the ends into the 12 sided beauty you see there.

• Next, I attached the flanges to the center of the plywood pieces with (8) 3/4" wood screws.

• I then cut 12 - 2' sections of 1x3 and attached them to the ends using (24) 2" drywall screws which is what I had lying around.

Now for the stupid part. In my last post I stated that with a 2' drum I could only have 3 across. This was based on my dividing 6" (my intra row spacing) into 2'. The answer to that is, of course, 4. However, I didn't want my dibbles going all the way to the edge of the drum so I subtracted one. What I forgot is that zero counts. I'm a dope.

• Finally (once I figured it out) I made markings on every other wood slat at 3",9",15" and 21". If you click on the photo to see the large version, you can see my first attempt at laying out the spacing (dots with x's through them) and my corrected attempt (dots with circles).
  

That's it for tonight. The next task is to cut and assemble the dibbles from the PVC sections. Next update...sometime next week. I have to dig potatoes tomorrow.

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.

Hello from us. It's been too long. Well now that the season is starting to show signs of ending, I think we're due for an update.

First off, for anyone who lives in the Capital District, you probably remember how much rain we received earlier this summer. Some crops (blueberries) loved it! Some (tomatoes) most assuredly did not. More than any other year, I've come to realize how important it is to have diversified crops. There were many weeks when the blueberry sales made up for lackluster harvests of other crops. That said, we've had prior years where Mummyberry has taken the majority of our blueberries and other crops made up the difference. As each year goes by we get a better and better feel for what conditions cause what problems.

Now on to the real news. As I mentioned in prior posts, there's going to be a little farmer born pretty soon. Because we REALLY don't know what we're doing in this arena, we've decided to scale back on farming for the next several years to make sure that the little whippersnapper gets all the attention he deserves! What this means is that we'll likely have a garden for ourselves while devoting our actual farming time to the cultivation of berries and garlic. I realize this flies in the face of what I said above about diversity on the farm, but baby comes first.

Because of this, we're scaling back on the Ballston Farmer's market. It's likely that we'll start later (July or so) and have much less to sell. On the other hand, we'll likely be attending and selling at a couple of Garlic festivals next fall. Stay tuned.