What To Do When It's 40 Below Outside?

What To Do When It's 40 Below Outside?

The advantage of being stuck inside during the cold winter days means that there is ample opportunity to plan for the coming growing season and prepare for planting.

This year I plan to use seed tape in an effort to cut down on the time spent sowing seed and thinning seedlings.

But seed tape is unbelievably expensive, so I thought that a great indoor craft for the whole family would be to make seed tape ourselves.

I looked about and quickly identified toilet paper as a potential ideal candidate for this exercise. All I needed was seeds and glue.

A handy biodegradable glue can be made from simply heating a mixture of corn starch and water. To make things more interesting, we added a bit of food colouring to two batches of glue (one for each child), so we could easily distinguish one seed line from another. 

In this post, we made seed tape for parsnips (using purple glue) spaced at 1/2 inch intervals, along with radishes (using green glue) that we will utilise as a quick crop while the parsnips are growing.

We made the glue quite runny, (1 tsp of corn starch to 250 ml of water) so it would dispense easily from a squeeze bottle in small blobs. Make sure the glue is not lumpy, as the lumps tend to get stuck in the squeeze bottle nozzle, and then release in a flood of glue all over your paper. It makes quite a mess!

Since different seeds need different spacing, I put together a few spacing markers using wheel shaped objects I salvaged from the toy box, and attached rubber bands such that they were separated by the desired distance.  In the picture here, I have a marking wheel with 1/2 inch spacings.

We rolled the spacing marker on an ink pad, and then rolled it down a strip of toilet paper. In under a minute, we had dozens of evenly spaced marks as guides for placing the glue dots.

First off was the radish seed, which one of the kids glued to the toilet paper with green glue by first making a series of dots where the marks indicated and then placing a seed into the dot before it set hard.

Once that was complete, the second child used their purple glue to attach the parsnip seeds in a similar fashion.


Once all the seeds were attached to the paper, they were left to dry overnight.

The toilet paper I used was a two ply variety, and I discovered that once dry, I could still separate the sheets if I was careful. This meant that I could get two strips of seed tape from one strip of toilet paper.

I flipped the paper over, and made a line of glue dots 2 inches apart into which I placed lettuce seeds.

Once these dried, I separated the sheets and rolled them onto old toilet rolls.

So there you have it. Very cheap seed tape, and you have the added benefit of making up whatever combinations you desire.

Come spring, all I need to do is roll out the tape and cover it with a little soil or mulch. 

If the past two seasons have taught me anything, it's that sowing seed in Thunder Bay involves being hunched over in the wind and rain, struggling to get dry seeds out of their packet with wet fingers.

This spring things will be different!