Seed Tape - Part 2

Seed Tape - Part 2

In a previous post, titled "What To Do When It's 40 Below Outside?", I wrote about making your own seed tape using toilet paper and cornstarch glue.

In the following months, I have refined my process for making seed tape, and have found it to be an awesome time saver when planting in the garden.

I have made seed tape for parsnips, carrots, spinach, broccoli, and cauliflower. All have been wildly successful, and I was thinking about how far could this process go for improving my spring planting experience.

Although seed potatoes are probably not a likely candidate for seed tape, peas and beans might be, and so this post is about making seed tape for large seeds.

The issue with large seeds is that they are heavy, and the cornstarch glue isn't all that strong. Simply sticking a bean to some toilet paper isn't likely to work all that well, as my experiments with coriander seed indicated when I found a lot of the seed comes unstuck during the rolling up / unrolling process.

So another tactic was required, and I've devised a way to secure large seeds to toilet paper that actually works well.

The first step involves getting a strip of toilet paper and separating the sheets so that one strip yields two (for 2-ply paper). 

Once you have the paper separated, you then fold each strip lengthwise. 

In the photo to the left, I used 3 strips of toilet paper to create 6 strips, all folded lengthwise down the centre.

The next step involves placing blobs of glue in a line along the each strip. For my peas, I am placing them 2 inches apart, and so the blobs of glue are also 2 inches apart. 

Once I finished putting the blobs of glue onto the paper strips, I then places a pea on top of each blob as shown in the photo to the right.

Once all the peas were placed onto the paper, I then went over them again with my glue bottle, and placed a drop of glue on top of each pea, so that there was glue underneath as well as on top of the seed.

I then folded the toilet paper strips lengthwise along the centre again, so that the seeds were completely covered with paper, and the glue held everything together.

In this image above, you can see the top 3 strips have been folded over as described, while the bottom 3 are patiently waiting their turn.

Once all the tape has been done, then I left them to dry overnight, and you can see the result below.

Each pea is solidly encased in a hard shell of dried cornstarch glue and toilet paper, almost like a little Papier-mâché ball. Having two layers of toilet paper on each side of the seed means that there is no way that it's going anywhere during transport and handling.

This technique works extremely well for seeds of any size, except for maybe coconuts.