Seed Tape

Thanks to an overabundance of rainy days and some (a very little, mind you) slacking on my part, the carrots did not get thinned this year. Add to that that they were planted too close to a hyper-growing tomato on one side and some carrot happy weeds on the other side and it came down to get the carrots out of the ground now or lose them in the undergrowth. So I dug a huge bunch of baby carrots yesterday.

 The rabbits and goats all had a feast of carrot tops last night and they were very happy critters. (We-elll, the last mating of the buck and doe rabbits didn't take so we were letting them try again. Maybe that had a little to do with the smiles on their faces?)

 But as far as the carrots situation, I decided to try my hand at making seed tapes today to prevent the necessity of thinning next time. So I mixed up a Tablespoon of corn starch and a cup of cold water until smooth.

Then I added a blop (an exact blop, not more or less) of green food coloring, for the purpose of being able to see it on the white background.

I brought that to a boil, stirring constantly. Then I let it cool for a minute while I got the rest of the supplies together.

yardstick and toilet paper

I stuck an old heavy ad under the toilet paper to keep the "glue" from leaking through and then used an old syringe to make glue dots an inch apart and dropped a seed into each dot.

Voila! Seed tape. I just made a small one for practice and am going to stick it in an empty spot in the garden as soon as it is dry. Away from the tomatoes. and the weeds.