A Favourite Tool: My Row Marker

Even though I no longer imitate Jethro Tull (the farmer, not the rock group) with his seed drill, (that is making my garden into long rows as agriculture does and then tramping all over the garden, compacting the soil, up and down these rows), I still need a Row Marker.  It’s all about optimized spacing of all vegetables and often a straight line is the easiest way to accomplish that.

Rows within a bed and across a bed can help make weeding between these rows easier.  Proper spacing within rows can lead to ideal shading out of late coming weeds between the rows.  Even when growing in equidistant spacings over the entire bed, like with planting pole beans, the Row Marker is the tool to find those spacings.

For many years I had a collection of row markers.  They were gangly, long handled rake looking things made from scraps of wood that had wooden pegs nailed on at different spacings.  Each marker had teeth pointing both up and down for different needed intervals.  I would store them under the deck’s floor joists in a jumbled mess.  Whenever I needed one the rest would come crashing down with it.

For years I wanted one single, adjustable Row Marker but wasn’t sure how to make it.  My son, The Organic Grower (TOG) has a fine and simple one:  He uses his 30 inch aluminum landscaper’s rake.  It has teeth spaced every inch and he found some type of rubber hose – a bit like thick walled heater hose from a car’s heating system – that slide and firmly hold onto his rake’s teeth.  These 6 inch pieces of hose are easily moved to any combination of teeth as needed for marking rows within his beds.

But my favourite bow rake’s teeth didn’t have one-inch spacings.  So I needed to make an adjustable row marker from scratch. TOG had given me an old cast off potential marker made of 2 by 2’s.  It was solid and nicely braced but the handle was too short for marking rows. I easily extended the handle using a half lap joint onto another length of 2 by 2.

I had a length of hose and found 6 cast off carriage bolts the proper length and thickness, along with nuts and wing nuts.  After that it was just drilling holes across the head of the marker in one-inch increments.  

The hose pieces are slid down the bolt and held captive between the bolt head and a hex nut. Enough bolt length is left to poke through the marker’s head holes and held in place with a wing nut.

It isn’t the quickest to change but it works well.  Unused bolts are stored in extra holes partway up the handle.  And it no longer lives under the deck joists – it has a safe and secure place to hang out and socialize with my other valuable tools --- in the garage.

Happy Gardening.