Spring is the busiest time in the garden, and any way you can save time is welcome. It’s easy and fun, and it saves time and money at planting time.
A seed tape is a strip of biodegradable paper with globs of adhesive in which you’ve sown seeds at the recommended spacing. Water dissolves the paper and adhesive, so the seeds germinate exactly where you want them.
Here’s what you need to make seed tapes
plain white paper towels
scissors, a yardstick, a pencil,
white glue
sealable plastic bags
seeds, both flower and vegetable seeds work well with this system
tweezers (optional)
food color if you want to color code your seed tapes (optional)
How to make seed tapes
- Thoroughly wash your hands and the counter where you will work. This thwarts “damping off” and other maladies that seeds can get.
- Unroll paper toweling to the length you want your rows. But be aware that if they’re much longer than three feet they seem to develop a mind of their own.
- Cut the toweling lengths into strips one inch or more wide. The wider paper stops other maverick seeds from sprouting and causing competition with the seeds you want to grow.
- With a yardstick and pencil draw a line down the middle of each strip. On your first seed packet find how far apart those seeds should be sown. Make X’s on your line that far apart. Write the name and variety at the top of the strip. Do the same with your other strips.
- Put a drop of glue on each X. For large seeds make it a big drop.
- Place a seed on each drop, using tweezers if this is hard to do. Cover the seed with another drop of glue. Do the same thing with your other seeds.
- Dry the seed tapes thoroughly, then roll them up and seal them in plastic bags. Label each bag with the name and variety of the seeds or, trust me, you’ll find rutabagas growing in your flowerbed and hollyhocks in with your vegetables.
Planting your seed tapes
When the weather has settled and it’s time to plant your seeds, prepare your beds, smoothing the lumps out. Dig shallow furrows and unroll your seed tapes into them. Cover them with about a ¼ inch of fine soil or sand. Water gently and keep the areas moist until your seedlings appear. They’ll be as straight and evenly placed as soldiers on parade. (That was a welcome surprise in my garden.)
This is a fun project you can tackle when you want to garden and the weather is too unsettled to work outside. It is also a good way to introduce children to gardening by letting them help make seed tapes. Children are then eager to see their flowers and veggies appear and to help harvest them.
A fascinating project for older children is to take an opened sheet of newspaper (preferably the want ads) and let them write their name on it very large with magic marker. Make X’s on their name as far apart as the seeds should be placed. Short plants like alyssum, lobelia, dwarf marigolds and zinnias are good choices. Plant the sheets of paper where they want their names to appear in living color and you’ll be surprised at how willing they are to weed those beds!
Originally published on HubPages by Dotnik
Chuffed.. My gardens awmose.. and i havnt paid for a thing.. besides the occasional One Pound’ shop purchase which i usually just take any way.. oh i forgot was holding that.. -Which is my first way of getting free seeds. Then there’s collecting the seeds from them from the very source.. ie.the flowers, fruit, root and vege which they are!- where there’s Markets and fruit shops theses always a bin out back (or front on garage night) shop keepers don’t usually mind if you ask for their waste either.. i tell them its for my animals. In particular tomatoes, pumpkins and peppers (definitely!), apples, avacardo, carrots (tops), potatoes (all sorts are easy!),citrus, peas, beans.. in fact i cant think of anything that hasn’t worked.. I even have a coconut palm (from a coconut !). Dry the seeds out by wrapping them in newspaper and putting somewhere warm. I put mine on top of the water-boiler. It takes from about a week for say chillies pepper or mandarin seeds to a couple of months, for say date or avacardo. -city style wild-crafting! Then of course germinate them. Quality compost is pretty essential here, the difference compared to using low quality dirt makes a couple of quid worth it. However i find there’s often broken packages of kids craft type grow kits in the shops from which you take the compost tabs that expand in water. when they’re little take them outside for short periods, get them used to the weather and temperature. Morning sun though the window, then outside till the evening then warm at night under the boiler is what i do. Then i transplant them straight into the ground..thirdly.. for The Window box! for herbs and lettuce, its an amazing place. More often now fresh lettuce and herbs is sold in pots -with roots!- from the supermarket. ( i get mine from the compost bin after my flatmates have used the other parts) leeks, spring-oinion, chives, yams, spinach.. any vege sold with roots basically- sometimes even fancy cabbage too.. obviously..plant these! but usually in well drained soil..I have a baby cherry tree and apple. Both these grew from seeds i collect from a nearby attolment. Which has turned out to be my fourth great source of free seeds! The old people there are great, I visit regulary, loads of advice and happy to share their seeds, bulbs, cutting..Its been a real joy,m and i think they like my keen interst.My goal was mostly for a totally recycled garden ie fences, beds, furniture.. its a bit of an addiction. But really if you compare a pound a pound of beams or tommy, or spud, ie. one family meal to a31.30 a packet of twenty, fifty or a hundred! seeds.- In my success- essentially each bean seed has given well over nine times one supermarket purchase. One potato has given me up to eight more potatoes, I now have fresh herbs and fancy lettuce all the time! and will NEVER have to buy tommy again! Its been an awesome project,I am thinking Id like to start a seed exchange sometime.
It depends on the produce. Green peppers are not ripe peppers so the seeds will be immature. to get pepper seeds you need to use a ripe (red, yellow or orange) peppertomatoes you can use the seeds but you need to ferment the seed first than dry them which takes about 2 to 3 weeks to do properly so you don’t get seed born diseases. Dried beans will work. Potatoes will work but get only organic as the non organic kind have a sprout inhibitor and tend to have more diseases (seed potatoes are certified disease free)Strawberries and raspberries do not come from seed but from plant divisions and runners leafy greens are harvested before they go to seed. Melon seed would be viable but these are almost always hybrid AND they are not grown in isolation so the seed would not only be hybrid but would have crossed with any other melon varieties grown within 2 miles so what ever grew would be nothing like the melon you got the seeds from. This would be true of zucchini, cucumbers and all winter squash as well.So in theory you could grow a garden this way but few if any of the crops would come back true because most everything is hybridized and since none of these crops were grown for saving seed you would have a lot of crosses on top of the hybrid crossing.If you want to experiment go for it, if you want a garden from which you can eat the food (by this I do not mean any food you harvest will be inedible, it won’t. I am saying you probably won’t get a lot to harvest) buy seed.
SELF SEEDINGIf you are lucky enough to visit a ptinrise rainforest you will probably be awestruck by the towering canopy. However, the future of the rainforest lies in the soil in the form of seeds – tiny cells of life waiting for their opportunity to prosper. If we are going to create an ecological garden then we have to make sure it too, has a future. By allowing some plants to go to seed, we can build up seed stores, just like the rainforest. And like the rainforest, we should aim to have thousands of seeds of many varieties spread right across our plot. Most of these seeds will never germinate because in the ecological garden the niche spaces are so tightly filled that opportunities for new life are limited.