Note 7 — Valuable Breed of Cattle.

A dibble is a simple tool, which may be of different sizes and forms, according to the uses it is intended to serve. If for setting (in transplanting) cabbages or other like plants, it may be a round stick about an inch and a quarter in diameter, shaved down at one end (in a slope of 8 or 10 inches long) to a blunt point. An old spade or shovel handle is well adapted to the purpose. If much used, the slope may be advantageously covered smoothly with iron. But for putting in seeds, the dibble may be in the form of the letter T. To make one, take a piece of wood about 3 feet 4 inches long, and about an inch and a quarter square. In one of the sides bore holes in a line, and insert teeth at the proposed distance of the plants in the row: if for Mangel Wurtzel, at 10, 11 or 12 inches apart; and let the teeth be as long (projecting from the head place) as the proposed depth at which the seeds are to be sown. On the opposite side of the head-piece, bore a hole in the middle, large enough to receive a handle of convenient length. On the top of the handle fix a cross-piece 5 or 6 inches long, to be grasped by the hand in using the tool.—With it, as many holes for seeds will be made, at every movement, as there are teeth in the head. The handle may require bracing, in like manner as a rake handle and its head is braced by means of bows.

It now occurs to me, that perhaps the light roller used in levelling the tops of the ridges may be set with teeth, and thus perform the additional office of making holes for the seed; and with vastly greater expedition than by dibbling. A light roller, long enough to flatten two ridges at once, of 13 inches in diameter, and furnished with two sets of four teeth each to pass along the middle of two adjoining ridges—and the four teeth of each set being inserted at equal distances in a circle of the roller,—the holes for the seed would be made at the desired distance of near one foot from each other. The teeth should be so shaped as to leave the holes made by them fairly open. For this purpose they may be an inch and a half wide and three quarters of an inch thick, where their shoulders are fayed to the roller, and taper thence to a rounded thick edge at their extremities. The same teeth, if not too long, may serve to regulate and expedite the sowing of the Ruta Baga seed.