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At a Master Gardener workshop someone said seed tapes were a real boon and she had made her own seed tapes. This (sorta) makes sense because the seed tapes available commercially generally don't come with open-pollinated seeds or they don't have the varieties I prefer. Also, when the seeds are so small it takes a magnifying glass to see just one, it's difficult to get them planted in a furrow in the ground.

Some of the lettuce seeds I wanted to plant are so tiny and difficult to manage in planting that I began with them. Also, carrot and spinach seeds are a pain to plant evenly in the ground.

So I gave it a try. Not much to it, mix corn starch (or flour) and water, put in a squeeze bottle, separate a two-ply roll of toilet tissue, apply the corn starch solution regularly along the tissue, plot a single seed on each drop and let them dry. Not to forget the tweezers to pick up individual seeds.

A big advantage of this approach is that it makes it easy to plant a strip by placing the tape in a wide furrow, and the spacing should be just right. I thought it would be easy to plant in succession and stretch out the harvest season.

First I planted the lettuce tape. The timing was good. The weather cooperated. I kept the ground moist. While I waited on the lettuce I buried a carrot seed tape and one with spinach seeds. I waited.

Not a single lettuce seed sprouted. Eventually, I had 3 carrots growing in the carrot row. I never saw a hint of a spinach sprout. It happened that the three carrots grew into very nice, long tapers, as I had hoped. But what of all the seeds that never saw the sun?

So much for do it myself seed tapes.