Fun Project!

A couple of weeks ago I got this book. It has a lot of neat ideas and one of the ideas that caught my attention was making your own seed tape. I had never heard about seed tape and I was on my way to scouting some out. You see, I hate pulling perfectly healthy little seedlings to make room for a single seedling to grow. Most seed packets tell you how many inches are to be spaced between each plant so seed tape allows you to place them on the tape at the recommended spacing.

I have been meaning to put out some more beet seeds and try and plant some more green bean seeds so I figured it was as good a time as any to try and make my own seed tape. I found that it was a good teaching experience as well. Aidan learned what a yard stick was and how many inches are in a yard and he learned how to read a package to find out the spacing of a seed and how to read the yard stick and space accordingly. It will now be an experiment to see if the seeds actually grow. I'm not certain that the seeds will grow through the flour paste and the newspaper.

Here is what you need:

newspaper, yardstick, a pastry bag (or ziploc with corner cut off) and some flour paste.

First, you rip your strips of newspaper. I used the yardstick as a guide:

ripping paper is fun

Then you line up a strip of paper against the yardstick and put little spots of the flour glue on the paper spacing what it suggests on the seed packet. The beets said to plant every three inches.

seed in paste


seeds being measured out


Aidan put down his game long enough to help put the seeds in the paste


Beets and Beans ready to go into dirt.

The books says to let the flour dry with the seeds in it and then to fold/roll it up and place it in a sealed bag to store until you are ready to use. We are going to drop these into the garden today so I'm just going to let them dry a bit and then take them out there.

We'll see if these babies actually grow or not. I hope they do because we can never have enough beets and I'm still bummed that my green bean seedlings died. Plus, if it does work, the kids and I will have a fun project in the winter getting seeds strips ready to plant in the ground in the spring.