Sunday 31 July 2011

Handmade mini dibber ... ...

If like us you grow a lot of plants you'll know that sowing the seeds is a bit of a chore, especially making holes for each seed, when the need calls for it.

I normally use a pencil for making seed holes, mainly for writing out the labels, but I've also found the end of a pencil makes for a good seed drill, however there is a down side, that being compost on the end of the pencil, and subsequently behind my ear seeing as that's where I keep my pencils most of the time.

So this morning I made a purpose designed and built mini dibber for planting my seeds. I just used a scrap piece of wood, I seem to have lots of these lying about the shed, used my recently built mini lathe to turn it, which is still working, and the mini lathe works much better now I've welded up the tail stock. 

Here's the mini dibber -

It's just about right for a pocket.

It's turned from a bit of pine, the dark lines are burned in, this is done by just holding another piece of wood to it whilst it's spinning, I wasn't going to add any type of decoration, but figured why not :-)

Another picture - 

Ta Da !

I made the end flat for a reason, that being once your seed is planted you need to tamp the soil down ;-) so it's a duel purpose dibber / pot tamper, it's small enough to be useful even with small cell seed trays.

Here's a picture next to a ruler -

Just about 9cm or nearly 4 inches in old money.

And there you have it, it took about 25 minutes to turn,sand and wax and will serve me well in my veg growing exploits :-) it's also a nice size for a child to use, so if the kids want to help they can use this to make nice neat seed drills at about the right depth, thanks to the markers on the pointy end.

Thanks for reading.

3 comments:

  1. Very clever . . . still ooohing and aahhhing over the lidded pot and wondering if there may be some for sale at a later date? Maybe?? :D

    ReplyDelete
  2. As it happens I'm in the process of setting up a small (for now) online shop, it'll have some of the things I've blogged about for sale, and some of the other things I make, but haven't blogged about.
    The lidded pots will probably appear in the shop from time to time, I'm working on ways of stopping them warping so much, and also working on ways of dying the wood for some interesting colours, with out the use of chemical dyes and stains.
    I'll no doubt tweet about the shop and blog about it when it goes live :-)

    ReplyDelete
  3. I shall keep an eye out then! :)

    ReplyDelete