“I like a neatly planted garden, which means evenly spaced
beans, corn or okra, but I don’t like to bend over to place each seed at
its recommended spacing. So I made myself a ‘poor- man’s
planter’ that saves me stooping, yet places each seed the correct distance
from its neighbor,” says Harold Richter of North Carolina. 
What is a poor-man’s planter? Well, it’s a simple
contraption made from a plastic soda bottle, a 4-foot section of 1/2-inch PVC
pipe and duct tape. Harold cut the soda bottle in half, leaving the neck and
about 4 inches of the body to create a funnel. Then he slipped the neck of the
bottle into the PVC pipe and attached it with duct tape.
“Now I walk upright through the rows, placing the bottom
of the pipe where I want the seed to go and dropping one or two seeds in the
funnel. It’s simple, and it’s much easier on my back.”
This planting tool can be as simple or as “souped up”
as you want it to be. For example, you could skip the funnel and use a PVC pipe
by itself with the same effect. Or, for something more elaborate, you could
even add a handle to the pipe with a PVC T-connector, a short section of PVC
and an old bicycle grip (see illustration).
