Planting beans and corn by hand is a pain. It involves a lot of stoop labor and crawling
around on the ground. I don’t plant
enough corn or beans to justify buying an automatic seeder, but I plant enough
that it gets very old poking holes in the ground with my finger and dropping a
seed into each hole. I decided to build
a hand seeder that would let me stand up to do this job and to, hopefully, make
it go a little faster. The results
turned out pretty good, so you may want to build one of these if you find
yourself in a similar circumstance.
My seeder is basically just a piece of PVC tubing that I can
drop a seed through to plant the seed in a hole. The nice thing about this simple device is
that it also makes the holes and spaces the seeds at the correct interval, and
it only cost me about five dollars to build.
Here is how I built it:
The main part of the planter is a piece of ½” PVC that is
about 48” long. You can make it longer
or shorter depending on your height.
This tube is what you will drop the seed down to plant it. To make the tube easier to use, I dropped
down about eight inches from the top, cut the tubing, and glued in an inline-T
fitting. I glued about an eight inch
long piece of tubing into the T to form a handle. I glued a cap onto the end of the handle, but
this is not really necessary.
To add the seed spacer/hole poker to my planter I came up
about six inches from the bottom of the planting tube and glued in another
in-line T. I glued a 5 ½” piece of
tubing into this T and then glued an elbow onto the end of the tubing. I then glued a piece of tubing that is about
six inches long into the bottom of the elbow.
At the bottom of this tube I inserted a tapered wooden plug to do the
actual hole poking. The plug is made out
of a piece of an old broom handle. It
goes up into the tubing about an inch and sticks out of the tubing about an
inch-and-a-quarter.
To hold the plug into the tubing I drilled a 3/16th
hole through the tubing and the plug. I
then took a long, narrow bolt and cut the head off of it so that it is like a
small piece of all-thread. I put the
all-thread through the hole, put a washer and nut on each side, and snugged
them up to the tubing. I left about an
inch of all-thread sticking out on each side.
The all-thread serves as a depth gauge so that I know how deep to push
the hole poker into the ground.
The last thing I did was duct tape a small tin can up near
the top of the planting tube. This can
is to hold the seeds that I am planting.
The planter is easy to use.
You start a row by using the hole poker to make a planting hole.
Now move the planter so that the planting tube is over the
hole.
Take a seed out of the seed can and drop it down the
planting tube.
Now press the hole poker down into the soil to make another
hole that is six inches farther down the row. Use the all-thread depth gauge to
make the hole the proper depth.
Move the planting tube over the new hole, drop a seed, and
so on, and so on, and so on.
I plant beans six inches apart and corn twelve inches apart,
so it is a simple matter to use the same planter for both types of seed. I just plant the corn in every other
hole. I have found that this simple
device saves me a lot of time and a lot of crawling around on my hands and
knees.