Seed Tapes

Seed tapes are an easy way to plant a row of seeds with precision spacing. This is a valuable technique when you have a short supply of seeds, or each seed is expensive. It provides for uniform spacing and avoids the need to thin out sprouting seedlings.

Simply put, seed tapes are just seeds fastened to some sort of thin biodegradable paper by an adhesive that is also biodegradable. This allows for the plant roots to grow through the paper as the adhesive dissolves around the seed. This allows the plant to grow unobstructed.

In a small pan, dissolve 1 tablespoon of cornstarch in 1 cup of cold water. Cook over a medium flame, stirring constantly to prevent the mixture from getting lumpy. Once it starts to boil and turns into a translucent gel-like mixture, remove it from the stove and let it cool to room temperature.

Cut the length of some paper towels as long as you would like your strips to be. The width should be about 1/2 to 3/4 inches wide.

Space your seeds according to the packaging they arrived in or according to your planting design.

Take the cooled cornstarch mixture and put a few spoonfuls into a small plastic bag. Work the gel mixture toward one corner of the bag, removing as much excess air as possible, then seal the bag. Next you'll need to snip off the corner of the bag to create a pastry bag like tool, similar to those that bakers use to ice cakes. If you are doing more than one type of seed, think about the size of the cut you make in the bag first. Smaller seeds will only need a tiny speck of gel, while larger ones may need a glob. It's always possible to put a bigger notch in the corner of the bag if you need bigger globs, so start with your small seeds first.

At this point it's a simple matter of dabbing on the gel at the right spacing and putting the seed in each dab.

One creative use of seed tapes is to plant them in patterns. This would allow you to precisely determine where various flowers or foil age will grow in relation to each other.

I'm not sure where I learned this, but it is certainly not an original thought on my part. I love the idea, though.