How to make DIY seed tape for succession planting

Yesterday my kids and I made homemade seed tape for our garden. We “sowed” over six hundred seeds onto paper towels in order to have them ready for the growing season.

It’s a really simple idea, easy enough that my 4, 6, and 8 year olds all understood it and were able to do it on their own. Plus it’s a really effective tool for when the season gets busy and you need to succession plant a crop every two weeks.

Not to mention most seeds that you can use seed tape for are very tiny.

They disappear the moment they hit the dirt, so this ensures more accurate seed spacing.

Materials to make homemade seed tape

• White flour
• water
• paper towels or newspaper cut into one inch strips
• a paintbrush
• seed

Unfortunately not all seeds can be made into seed tape. Things like tomatoes and peppers really need to be started indoors. Thinks like sunflowers are so big and need such expansive spacing that it’s not necessary.

So what seeds can be turned into homemade seed tape?

• Radishes
• Carrots
• Leaf Lettuces
• Beets
• Flowers like Zinnia
• anything cold hardy and that would be direct sown

@karacarrero

Reply to @s2dio2 get organized for planting seeds now with this easy DIY #SeedStarting tape! Save it until the right time to plant 🌱

♬ original sound – Kara Carrero

Related: Preserving the canning tradition: the best tools of the trade

How to assemble the DIY seed tape

After cutting paper towel, but kids mixed just enough water into a small dish of flour to make it spreadable by paintbrush. Any more than that and it could stay wet long enough to sprout the seed.

We don’t want that! Not yet!

Make sure you’re spacing according to your seed packaging and that you write the name and row spacing on the seed tape.

Let them dry – it should only take an hour or so.

Roll them up, placing all varieties of carrots in a “Carrot” bag {because remember, we are naming the bag as the general plant}. Then into our basement fridge they go!

The whole paper towel or newspaper gets buried at the depth indicated on the seed package. {If we forget to write the info or don’t have the seed packet, a good rule of thumb is twice the depth of the seed itself.}

When planting, saturate in water and it will start the germination process on its own and you will wash away some of the flour under the soil.

We do succession planting with almost all of these crops. Meaning we plant every two weeks all through the growing season to have continuous crops and harvests. I estimated our family would need around four hundred regular size carrots. So having all the homemade seed tape means we can be ready to sow them into the beds as needed.