A dibble board is a great tool to have around to help with quick and easy seed spacing. Spacing is important for optimal performance of your plants – if your plants are too close together they will compete with one another for nutrients and water – and pest/disease problems are more likely as well. However, proper spacing can take a bit of extra time and effort, depending on your garden layout, or you end up wasting seed later by thinning your seedlings to reach proper spacing. Who wants to waste seed or time? Sometimes both?
A dibble board is designed to reduce both time and waste in the garden. You can spend money buying one already made, or you can probably make one yourself with odds and ends you already have laying around the house and very basic skills with tools.
What have I tried in the past?
In years past I have broadcast some seeds over the beds and thin later (that equated to lots of seed waste and far too much time trying to thin), I figured time saved just getting seed in the ground would outweigh what it would take later, to thin. Later, I then broadcast in rows, so at least the seedlings would be in the same general area instead of all over. Still, lots of seed waste and time. My next attempt was to use a string tied from one end of the garden bed to the other, marking my rows. I tried to space my seeds along the string. In some cases, I tied knots at regular intervals along the string so I didn’t need to guess too badly at spacing. I have also used a ruler (I’m a perfectionist of sorts….) and tried to set a single seed or just a few in small holes I dug. The string was helpful to keep my rows straight, and I still use a string today to help guide my rows. Making an extra effort to ensure seed spacing and single/double seeds per hole did reduce seed loss by a lot – but the time spent seeding increased.
A few years ago I had an idea – create a board (or several) with pegs that could make holes in the ground and were evenly spaced so I could pop seeds in the holes and get my seeding done quickly. I put together a dibble board, and it has been a great tool that I have been using for years.
I am going to issue a caution here: I used scrap pieces, it’s not beautiful, there could be a better way to go about doing this…. BUT it’s functional and has worked for the past three seasons. That’s a win in my book.
So here is how I did it:
I used a 2×4, a dowel rod (probably 1 inch? It was in the burn pile attached to something so I’m not sure on diameter, but diameter really isn’t important here) and screws. I cut the dowel rod in short segments – maybe an inch but it could (and probably should) be shorter to an average depth of the seeds you plant. Considering very few direct sown seeds are planted at an inch depth, this was one of my mistakes – but I can reduce how far I push this into the dirt and I can control how much soil I fill the holes in with, so I am mindful of proper depth. Then I screwed the dower rods on the bottom of a 2×4 that was cut to the width of my garden. I used a yardstick and measured the distance I wanted the pegs to be. I left a margin of about 6 inches on either side of the board so I wasn’t planting right up to the edge of my garden bed (plant overhang would likely get damaged as I cut my garden aisles, so I felt 6 inches was a good starting point. My beds are about 4 ft. wide, so that is about how long my board is.
After attaching pegs to one side, I then picked a different length and did the other side. I have 2, 4, 6, 12, 18 and 24 inch spacing, two different spacing per board.
Here is how I use it:
I have found this can only be used on bare dirt, so if you have mulched beds your experience may vary. You will have to push the mulch aside to get to the dirt layer (ideally on an already established bed). If your bed has been sitting for a while, your soil hopefully won’t be too compact to use it, a simple clearing of the mulch and pressing the board in the area you cleared will hopefully work. If not, loosen the top layer of the soil somehow – using a hoe, pitchfork, or some other such tool. You don’t want t turn over the whole bed, or even go deep, just deep enough to leave an indentation from the pegs.
I till some of my beds to break the top layer of soil up a bit. Then I get down on my knees with my hands at either end of the board, and using the board with the narrow side touching the dirt, I move the board back and forth to smooth the surface of my bed. if I don’t do this, there will be areas of the garden bed that the pegs don’t’ reach because the soil is uneven.
Once the soil is smooth, I take my board and, with the pegs on the bottom of the board, stamp it into the ground.
I created the dibble board originally to be used straight across the width of the bed (which is why I had included the margins on either end), but in order to use it, that required that I kneel and walk in the garden bed, compressing the soil. I later changed up how I used it by using it in segments across the bed, smoothing soil from top to bottom if I am kneeling in the aisle between beds. I then stamp the dibble board in the dirt parallel to the length of the garden bed starting at the side furthest from me, then stamp additional rows coming back to the aisle I am kneeling in, depending on row spacing. I might place some sticks in the dirt to mark my rows at the beginning of the bed, but I can continue to stamp rows further down the bed as I work in segments as wide as my board, continually clearing, then stamping. I can see where the rows were previously stamped, and continue working off of that as far as row spacing.
I ended up looking online after I made these to see if there was anything like it, and I saw dibbles (also made one of those – love it for pricking out seedlings from my plug trays) and wider boards instead of a 2×4. I think those would be great to use, if they lined up well with the size of your garden bed. The nice thing about the dibble board I put together is that you can cut the 2×4 to whatever length you need – whether it’s the width of your garden bed or an armspan that is comfortable for you. Whatever you do, don’t make it too big to use comfortably.
Have you made something similar? I’d love to see it!